299 Days: The Restoration

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.

However, she could not instantly feel comfortable in Olympia. She thought people would mock her, or would preach to her some fundamentalist Christianity, or wanted to hurt her because she was from “evil” Seattle. Yet, she knew it was better here. She could not decide if she belonged in New Washington, especially since she couldn’t feel comfortable in New Washington. She didn’t need permission to do things here. Everything was legal. There were so few police and soldiers around. People were making decisions for themselves.

Carol found this very hard. She had difficulty making decisions, even about little things. It was frustrating to make decisions. It seemed like too much work to make her own decisions. Then she would realize that making decisions was normal and having them made for you was not normal. She was slowly adjusting. Grant realized that his sister was suffering from what newly released prisoners often struggled with. They had had decisions made for them for so long that freedom was hard to adjust to.

Grant told Carol about the deal that got her out. A straight one-for-one swap of Carol for Grant was laughed at by the New Washington leadership. A war hero and head of the ReconComm for… a Spanish literature professor? The New Washington leadership never told Grant about the situation in case he did something stupid like turn himself in to Seattle to save his sister. Later, after he found out, Grant had to admit that he never would have done that. He barely knew his sister and she had made repeated choices to stay in Seattle. He didn’t want her in jail, but she chose to live in a place where people went to jail for no reason.

Just as the New Washington leadership suspected, Carol was the opening bid in a negotiation. When it was all over with, the Patriots and Limas traded prisoners. Equal numbers for equal numbers. The Patriots bent their own rules and counted Carol as a Lima prisoner to be swapped. So they got her out, but it only cost them a random Lima, not a prize like Grant’s capture.

As Carol settled into New Washington, she had to hide her identity because, as a family member of the chair of the ReconComm, she was a target for Lima attacks. She would also be a big target for a kidnapper because she could be used to get pardons from Grant. So New Washington issued her a new identity and she found a job working at a small bookstore. No one needed a Simon Bolivar-era Spanish literature professor anymore.