Free 299 Days: The Collapse by Glen Tate

guy at the gun store when we were evacuating it,” he said, deciding it was time to come clean.
    “Evacuating?” she asked.
    “Oh, in all the mayhem,” Grant said, realizing how much he was going to get yelled at, “I forgot to tell you that my friends at Capitol City Guns called around dinner tonight and said they needed some armed guards while they emptied out their shelves. They’re hiding their guns. They know that armed gangs and looters will be coming to steal their stuff. Everyone wants a gun right now for protection.”
    “Armed guards?” Lisa yelled. “You? What were you doing?”
    This wasn’t going well. “It doesn’t matter now,” Grant said, hoping he could recover from this. “What matters is that people with things like guns are evacuating from the city and need armed guards to do it. With all the traffic jams, the semi trucks can’t get through. The grocery stores only have about two days of food, and that’s if people don’t freak out and stock up, which they will. Hell, they already are. The power went off in the entire western U.S. for a few hours. That wasn’t an accident. Whoever did that can do it again. And will. It might be the Red Brigade who just blew up Congress today.”
    “You’re overreacting, Grant,” she said. “What are the odds that there is a terrorist attack, power outages, and the grocery stores are out of food? That just doesn’t happen.”
    Grant tried to keep his voice down. “You’re right. That doesn’t just happen. But it just did happen. Honey…Congress has been blown up. The Senate office building, to be exact. Go check the news.” He handed her the TV remote control and continued, “You’ll also see that right after the bombing, the power was off for a few hours all across the West and on the East Coast. Don’t you see that this isn’t just another day? It’s a breakdown of things. Of everything. It might be temporary—God, I hope it is—but it’s happening. It’s happening, Lisa. We need to be ready for anything. Not just for our sake, but really for the kids.” Grant paused. He wanted to gauge how she was taking this in. She was just quiet. He decided he needed to say one more thing. They, or maybe just he, needed to get going on the bug out to the cabin so this conversation needed to wrap up.
    “Honey,” Grant said, “for forty plus years of your life, nothing weird like this has ever happened to you. That’s good. I have seen violence and horrible things. I understand that really bad things can happen. But you’re used to things being normal. That’s…well, normal. Normal is normal. That’s fair.”
    Grant pointed outside, toward where the shooting had been, “But this is the one time in our lives where normal isn’t there anymore. We need to take the situation as it is and deal with it. For the kids. For us. Let’s go out to the cabin for a little while until this blows over.”
    Lisa was silent.
    “You’re crazy and this is stupid,” she finally said. “You are overreacting. You just shot some people and you’re not thinking straight.” She paused.
    “And I don’t like the implication that I’ve been wrong about things,” she said. “You are yelling at me and telling me I’m wrong and I don’t like it. I’m not going out to your stupid cabin just because there’s some protest.” She folded her arms. “I am staying here, and so are the kids. You can go if you want. Don’t ever come back.”
    That stung.
    You know what you have to do. This is when you need to leave.
    This couldn’t be happening. Grant needed to convince her. “No, honey,” he pleaded. “You need to come with me to a place that’s safe with food. You need to come with me. We need to go tonight.”
    She started to cry. “I’m not leaving!” She fully expected him to give in. He always did when she cried. Always.
    “Not this time, honey,” Grant said in an amazingly calm voice. “Crying won’t do it.”
    Lisa was stunned that Grant