Free 299 Days: The Visitors by Glen Tate

meager diet was costly.
    The main penalty was taking away suspects’ FCards. Arresting them was done more to intimidate others than to actually incarcerate the suspects. That’s about all the government could do.
    All of the insurrection powers exercised by the government were “temporary.” Order had to be restored, Jeanie kept telling herself. She realized she had a personal stake in supporting all the emergency powers. If strong measures weren’t taken, the Patriots (or terrorists, or paras, or whatever they were) would kill every government official. Like her.
    Oh God, Jeanie thought. Where does this all end? There were so many people killing each other already. People can’t just forget all the killings and get back to normal. This could never be “temporary.” It will continue until one side wins, and that side wipes out the other side.
    She was starting to wonder if she’d picked the right side.

 
    Chapter 145
    Tom’s “New Normal”
    (June 4)
     
    The rooster woke Tom Foster. He was getting used to it. In fact, the rooster crowing at dawn, which was about 4:30 a.m. this time of year, was feeling normal. He never thought it would. Now it was part of his day.
    What a change he’d been through. Just a month ago, he was an executive for the state’s largest business association, the Washington Association of Business. He lived in a nice home in Olympia and ate at restaurants all the time; business lunches and dinners were part of his job. He never really did anything outdoors. He kept in decent shape, but was definitely a city boy.
    Not anymore. Now he was getting up at the crack of dawn out at the Prosser Farm. He worked with his hands outside all day. He ate what he hunted or milked. He was growing food in his garden, too. His hands were starting to callus. At first, he was sore from all the new physical activity, but his body was quickly becoming accustomed to the labor. He was getting in great shape, and he was tan. He felt pretty good.
    The one Prosser Farm activity that resembled their old undercover activities was that they had continued to record the Rebel Radio Podcast episodes. Brian, Ben, and Tom would get together once a week and talk into the microphone attached to the laptop that Tom brought out when they fled Olympia to hide out on the farm. They talked about how everything happening had been totally predictable. They called that segment of the show “Who Saw That Comin’?” They would talk about how they had been warning against the extreme expansion of government for years before the Collapse. They would recall the examples of corruption they discussed on the show before the Collapse. They didn’t treat their past predictions which had come true in a snarky “I told you so” way. Instead, they approached their accurate predictions by saying, “Well, we were right. Now hear what else we think is coming.”
    They couldn’t post their new episodes on the internet, of course, so they burned them onto CDs and Dennis smuggled them into Olympia for distribution to the Patriots. They wondered if anyone was even listening.
    Things were going just fine at the Prosser Farm, especially when Tom realized what they had out there compared to Olympia. Tom and the other WAB people and their families would have been rounded up by those Freedom Corps idiots under the “Declaration of Insurrection” or whatever the government was calling the power it gave itself. Tom wondered how many of his WAB staff and friends had been picked up. He wondered if they were still alive or languishing in a jail somewhere.
    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