“Could I get you a glass of water?” Ron asked Sherri, before she could mention how good the Pop-Tart would taste with a glass of milk.
“Sure,” she said.
“Me too, Daddy,” Ron’s youngest said, as she came back into the kitchen.
They stood in the kitchen talking about the general stuff that a family talks about while they enjoyed Pop-Tarts together.
Ron would try to get another box tomorrow. If he got one, he would hide it and give it to the kids for Christmas, which, by then, could be the best present ever. He would walk to the store in the morning, as gas was too valuable to waste on Pop-Tart runs.
He drove around much more than most people because he could still get gas by selling the silver he squirrelled away before the Collapse. He traded silver coins for FCards and then used the FCards to get gas at the gang stations. As an accountant, Ron didn’t really have a job anymore so he had time to help people who needed transportation, especially people from his church.
Believe it or not, he actually made a living this way. His overhead was low—no taxes anymore. Technically, there were taxes due on things, but the last thing in the world the government had time or resources to do was collect taxes. It was funding itself by stealing everyone’s savings and bank accounts and by controlling all the food and fuel supplies—and taking a cut, of course. Ron didn’t have any real bills. The government quit sending power, water, and natural gas bills because it realized that cutting off these utilities would cause a massive revolt. All the other things the Spencer household used to spend money on—saving for college, clothes, restaurants, vacations—was no longer being purchased. It was amazing how much money they no longer spent. Amazing.
What about Ron’s mortgage? The banks weren’t even trying to foreclose. No one paid their mortgages anymore. Not a single person. The banks were closed; it was impossible to go to the bank in person or online and pay your mortgage even if you wanted to. Every home would be up for sale and no one had any money to buy them.
Surprisingly, the banks didn’t care about people not paying their mortgages. The government had taken over all the banks, purchased all the loans, and decided to not even try to collect on them. Not because the government was nice, but because the government had bigger problems. It was hard enough for them to feed people. The government wasn’t about to start evicting people. The Southern and Western states had functionally seceded and the federal government couldn’t trust most military units. They were constantly putting down riots. Would kicking everyone out of their homes really be a good idea?
The same applied to credit cards, car payments, and student loans. The government would not even try to collect on those debts—besides, the dollar was worthless now anyway, and the loans were payable in dollars, so why even try?
Paying your bills was such a pre-Collapse idea. It was the old way of thinking about money and debt. The new reality was that the government stole everyone’s bank accounts and gave people some credits on their FCards to buy food. Paying back your credit card bills was a relic of the past. Now there were no credit cards and nothing to buy with them. Therefore, there were no credit card bills.
Ron thought about the sheeple all around him. Most of them were thrilled that there were no more credit card bills. That’s all they knew about the new system—and they liked it just fine. Time for those greedy banks to get screwed for a change, they thought. Of course, those greedy bankers had just stolen about $20 trillion in retirement funds, but the most of the sheeple didn’t have any retirement funds so they didn’t care. They couldn’t wait to go out and vote for the people who got rid of their credit card bills. If there would even be elections this year, which seemed unlikely.
The new reality that no one had real jobs anymore was a huge adjustment for Ron. He had started working when he was twelve by mowing lawns. Ron had to do something to keep his mind sharp now that he didn’t have his accounting job. Driving people around wasn’t really enough. So, he volunteered as an accountant for the FC.
Ron was a solid Patriot and hated the FC, but he volunteered for several reasons. First of all, he was now a little bit more of an “insider” and could find out where gas was being sold and things like whether a store had Pop-Tarts. His FCorps ID got him things others couldn’t get.
Second, he had been pretty vocal about being a Patriot before the Collapse. Now, though, he didn’t want people to think he was a Patriot. He could lose his FCard, or maybe even get sent to one of those God-awful TDFs. He had even been involved in the killing of the looters. Ron had fired at them before Grant Matson had saved his life. That had put Ron at odds with the Loyalists, like Nancy Ringman, who wanted to rely solely on official law enforcement. This made Ron an enemy of the Loyalists in his neighborhood. Ron needed to cover his tracks.
To do this effectively, he decided to be a gray man, by resisting the government in an under-the-radar, low-key way. Undetected. Gray men (and women) did not outwardly pick sides; they operated in the middle and blended in. Outwardly, they even seemed to support the Loyalists, although they were actually doing everything possible to secretly undermine and sabotage them. Ron could be a more effective gray man if he were doing an “inside job” as an FCorps member.
Specifically, Ron could learn things as an FCorps accountant and pass that information on to the Patriots. He was testing the waters with some of his friends who he suspected were also “gray” and might be working for the Patriots. He was slowly gathering information and would get it to the right people at the right time. He wasn’t in a hurry; he suspected this would last a long time.
He quickly realized that doing accounting work for the FCorps was not keeping his mind sharp. There was no real accounting to do, as the FCorps didn’t keep any meaningful records. Doing so would just show all the corruption. Just like everything else with the post-Collapse government, accounting was a charade. The government would assure everyone that there were stringent accounting and oversight mechanisms to make sure the relief got to the people, but there weren’t.
Ever since the day in mid-May when he first saw the graffiti saying, “I miss America” and “Resist,” Ron decided to make graffiti his gray man sabotage activity. Spray painting a slogan? That’s it? That’s what people might have thought before the Collapse. But even spray painting was dangerous now. That could get your FCard taken away, get you on the POI list, and maybe even thrown into a TDF.
Many people who read the “I miss America” messages realized that they did, indeed, miss America. It would make them think about how good things used to be and how much the government had screwed things up. They would begin to think that getting things back to the good old days meant getting the current government out of the way.
That’s exactly the reaction the Patriots expected from the graffiti. Now one more person was blaming the government, not the Patriots, for their miserable life and realizing the only way to improve things was for the current government to be replaced.
The graffiti made an impression on nearly everyone. Most people were Undecideds who were just trying to make it through the Collapse. Their main concerns were getting enough to eat and not getting robbed that day. Seeing the graffiti slowly made them realize that there was more than just worrying about eating or not getting robbed. There was a reason all these bad things were happening: the government. The graffiti showed them who was trying to improve things and who might have a better plan: the Patriots. It also showed the Undecideds that the Patriots were everywhere and the government wasn’t able to stop them.