299 Days: The Collapse

Chapter 49 The Easter Bunny (May 5)

Grant was in a daze. Everything was cloudy and exaggerated. He had a raging headache. He got in the door and Lisa was there, looking concerned. She had heard the shots.

“We have to go right now!” Grant yelled to Lisa.

“What?” She looked at his pistol on his belt. “Where did you get that?”

“I had to shoot some guys,” Grant said. “Some bad guys. Trying to attack Ron.” He realized he was yelling even though she was just a few feet away.

“What?” she asked for a second time. It was starting to sink in. She heard gun shots, her husband was on a crime patrol, and now he was saying he shot some guys.

Grant wanted to change out of his clothes. He was sure they were soaked with blood. He looked at them and they didn’t seem to have any on them. But he was convinced they were soaked with blood and were… dirty. Dirty. Dirty. He realized he was freaking out. He needed to calm down. Suddenly, a really terrifying thought crossed his mind.

The police. Grant had just killed three people and apparently wounded some more. Maybe Ron hit some of them, but Grant had shot most of them. His mind was replaying the shooting over and over. He could see each one of the targets—people—as he shot them.

Police? What police? Well, for a multiple shooting, they might send someone over. But then again, they were battling some huge protests at the capitol right then. There probably were not any police available in a fifty-mile radius. That thought comforted Grant.

Grant’s mind started racing. Would he be arrested in a few days when the police could come by? Would that gang, or punks, or whoever they were, come back? Would his guns get seized? He was only protecting Ron and the neighborhood.

“We have to go now,” Grant yelled. “We have to go out to the cabin. These guys might come back or the police could show up and they won’t understand.” It was like an emotional dam broke in him. All his fears, all his frustration at no one listening to him, all his begging to go out to safety at the cabin. It was all coming out at once. Right now.

“What?” Lisa asked, obviously terrified by her bizarrely acting husband. “No, you need to talk to the police,” she said and picked up the phone like she was going to dial 911.

“What police?” Grant said, at a normal volume now, instead of yelling. “They’re busy now. We have to go.”

“We can’t just leave,” Lisa said. “Cole needs his things. I need my things. Manda has ballet rehearsals,” Lisa said.

Ballet rehearsals? Ballet?

Was this really happening?

Lisa kept listing all the reasons why they couldn’t leave. “Cole needs his routine…all our things are here…we can’t go. This will be over soon when the police can come out here.” She didn’t seem to believe that last part, but was saying it anyway.

Grant snapped back. “No, Lisa! Damn it! The police won’t be out here. Things will not be back to normal soon, if ever.” He was yelling again and couldn’t stop. “No, Lisa, everything is different. You need to adapt to the situation or we’ll all be dead.” He felt a lecture on normalcy bias coming on and thought he’d save that for another time. It was time for the Easter Bunny speech he had rehearsed in this head for months.

The Easter Bunny speech was for when the shit had hit the fan and it was time to go. Grant would tell her that he had enough supplies at the cabin for months. He would tell her that the Easter Bunny had put them out there. That way he wouldn’t have to get into a debate about him having foreseen this. Saying the “Easter Bunny” took care of all this would remove the “I told you so” sting from it.

“Honey,” Grant started to explain in his calmest voice possible, “I have at least nine months of food out there. The Easter Bunny left it out there. And we have neighbors out there who will work with us. I have guns and ammunition there. It’s extremely safe out there.”

What? Lisa thought as she heard this. Some kind of stockpile out at the cabin? Why would someone do that? The Easter Bunny? Maybe Grant was delusional after the shooting. She saw that often in the ER. Lisa was thoroughly confused.

She thought Grant misspoke about “nine months” of food. He was excited and must have meant nine “days” of groceries, she thought. It never occurred to her that he actually had nine months of food out there. Where would he get it? How would he pay for it without her knowing? Where would he store it? Lisa could not believe that he really had all that food out there.

“What are you talking about?” she asked. She was living in the “normal” world, where husbands don’t shoot people, where the neighborhood is safe, and where there would be no reason to have nine months of food at some cabin in the country.

Grant could tell that Lisa simply couldn’t process what was happening. She was extremely intelligent, but simply didn’t know the things he knew. He thought he’d try to live in her world for a few moments right then to see if that would work to convince her. He lowered his voice and spoke as calmly as possible.

“Let’s say this is all over in a few days and everything goes back to normal,” he said with a shrug. “Ron saw everything and he can talk to the police so I don’t need to be around to do that. After a few days, when everything is fine, you can tell your friends that you went out to your cabin because it was quieter. Call it a vacation. Tell them that I was freaked out after what I had to do with the looters.”

Lisa wasn’t listening to that last part where Grant was talking at a lower voice. He had yelled at her and she didn’t like that. All she was thinking about was that he was yelling at her, had just shot some people, and wanted to go to the cabin, which was weird. She just stared at him.

“We’re not going out to some country cabin,” she said as she crossed her arms. “This is our home. You need to go to police and tell them what happened. I mean, why do we need to leave here?”

The reasons were so obvious to Grant but he was aware that Lisa didn’t know all the things he knew. She hadn’t known about the armed evacuation of the gun store a few hours earlier. She hadn’t studied the LA Riots and the looting after Katrina. She hadn’t studied the Russian collapse in the 1990s or the Argentine collapse of the early 2000s. She didn’t know about the bankruptcy of the state and federal governments and what happens when tens of millions of totally dependent people are cut off from welfare. She didn’t know about how much the government hated people like Grant and what they would try to do to people like him. She hadn’t had conversations with a Green Beret about how to fight a guerilla war against a totalitarian government. He had been right about everything so far, about how the Collapse would proceed. He had the outside thoughts telling him things that always came true. She hadn’t heard, seen, or thought of any of this.

Because she had made it clear that she didn’t want to hear, see, or think about any of this. The more troubling things got, her response was to gravitate even more toward the “normal.” Toward insisting on the “normal” and trying to force the square peg of current events into the round hole of “normal.” Grant couldn’t talk to her about this. When he did, she put her hands up to her ears and yelled at him.

He was suddenly terrified. He realized the gap between what he knew about the reality of the situation and what she knew was huge. In a split second, it all came together. They had been living entirely separate lives when it came to what was happening. He realized he needed to tell her what was going on. The stakes were too high now to try to avoid upsetting her. Too late for that; shooting people had pretty much taken care of that.

He owed Lisa an answer to her question of why they needed to go. He calmed himself, to the extent that was possible, and started explaining in his nicest, softest voice.

“You ask a fair question, dear,” Grant said, amazed at how much he’d calmed down. “Why go? Because society is starting to break down, honey. Look at the evidence around you right now. We’ve never even had a crime in our neighborhood in the fifteen years we’ve lived here. No one has ever even called the police here. Now, tonight, we have a gang of God knows how many young thugs with guns charging Ron and me. They were trying to kill us. Don’t you see what’s happening? There are no police because they are fighting hundreds, probably thousands, of protestors down at the capitol.”

She smirked like he was exaggerating the number of protestors. Grant said, “Yes, dear, I saw cars and people on foot streaming there this afternoon. These people are angry, yelling, screaming, and demanding their programs back. I talked to a guy a few hours ago who said that it was a running battle at the capitol.”

“Who were you talking to?” she asked. He could tell she was trying to figure out if this was one of his weirdo conservative friends.

“A 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 just said that. She started bawling. She was shaking and crying harder than he’d ever seen her.

All during their marriage, arguments ended when Grant hugged Lisa. She always interpreted the hug to mean she won; he interpreted the hug to mean he was doing the right thing by getting the argument behind them. Usually Grant didn’t really feel like hugging her after an argument. But he did it because he loved her.

Grant could feel that this was the “hug moment” and he almost started to hug her, out of habit. But he stopped. He couldn’t hug her. Not this time. Things were different. The country was falling apart, there was a riot occurring three miles away from them, and he had just killed several people attacking their neighborhood.

Hugging her would mean he agreed to stay put. And that meant dying. He had tried so many times to talk sense into her. If she couldn’t see why going to the cabin was the only thing to do, then she never would; hug or not. The outside thought was right. He had to go.

“Too bad, dear,” Grant said with a sigh. “I’m leaving. I won’t take the kids, even though Manda wants to come. I won’t use the kids as leverage to get you to come. If anything happens to them…” As mad as he was at her, he couldn’t make her feel guilty for what he knew was going to happen in a few days in the city, so he stopped short of saying what he meant.

Lisa wanted to yell out, “Hug me, stupid! If you hug me, I’ll go out to your stupid cabin for a few days.” She needed the hug because that meant things were like they used to be. Things would be normal if he hugged her, and she desperately needed some normal. She needed that hug so badly. She waited for it. She didn’t think she needed to ask for it; he should just do it.

*****

“Bye,” Grant said. “Please come and join me. Please.”

She just cried.

Grant remembered what his Grandpa said back in Oklahoma. “Don’t ever want something so much you’ll do anything for it. You’ll pay too high a price, in money or something else. Maybe your soul.” That was exactly right. Grant wanted Lisa too much. He wanted to be with her and the kids so much. Too much. He could feel himself actually thinking about staying in the house—even with the riots, looters, and maybe the police after him—because he wanted them to be together. How stupid was that? Talk about paying too high a price for something. No.

Grant wanted Lisa to come with him, but he wasn’t willing to pay a price like death or jail to be with her. People could say he “abandoned” his family if they wanted to. Lisa was making a choice. She was choosing to stay in a place where they would die or Grant would go to jail. Grant couldn’t live with that choice.

He had tried several times over the years to change her mind. He did amazing things to make it possible for her to have a safe place like getting the cabin and stocking it with supplies. What else could he do? Seriously. What else could he have done for her?

Grant wasn’t going to put a gun to her head and tell her to get in the car. People make stupid choices every day. She was making one today. He wasn’t going to die for her. He would die to try to save her but not for ballet rehearsals.

It was weird. After Grant finally decided in his head that he would have to go to the cabin without her, everything became clear. He was relieved. He could actually think just about fighting off criminals, getting past any checkpoints that might be out there, securing enough food, roadblocks, and other “little” things like that. They were little compared to the mental weight of trying to constantly convince Lisa to come with him. He actually smiled. OK. This is how it’s going to be. Play the hand you’ve been dealt and survive. Don’t live by the “normal” rules because there is no more “normal.”

Grant had a plan for this. Of course. He went out to his car, walking past Lisa, who was crying, and got his list of things to take with him. He started gathering them up, including stealing Manda’s cell phone. He had a use for that. He hoped that she didn’t mind that he had stolen it. Given what was happening, it seemed like a small thing.

Grant’s plan for the possibility that Lisa would not come to the cabin was to leave her some food and the .38 revolver with the red laser dot. He went to the garage and got the food out of his trunk that he purchased at Cash n’ Carry earlier that day. Twenty-five pounds of pancake mix, a few big jars of peanut butter, twenty pounds of pasta, a case of big cans of pasta sauce, several hundred individual oatmeal packets. He put the food in a pile in the garage and put the .38 carrying case on top. He put an ammo can of .38 ammo at the base of the pile. He looked at the pile and said to himself, “So, twenty-five plus years together and it comes down to this.”

The pile was a symbol of how Grant had failed. He couldn’t convince a woman who supposedly loved him to leave a dangerous situation and come to a safe place. He had failed.

Deal with it, Grant thought. Deal with it because there will be more heartbreak and disappointment coming in the next few…however long this lasts.

Grant found Lisa in their bedroom crying. He said, “Come to the garage. There is something you need to see.” She didn’t want to come. She probably thought it was a dead body. That actually made him laugh to himself. Dark humor in a dark time.

“Fine,” he said. “There’s enough food for a month or so, even stuff you like to eat. It’s in the garage.” He added, sarcastically, “I’m so crazy that I got you all this stuff. Boy, you have a shitty husband, don’t you?” He couldn’t help it. It was so absurd. He was pissed at her. “I’m leaving you a gun. Manda will show you how to use it. You’ll need it. Of course, you and the kids could be with me far from the rioting and with neighbors who will look out after us. But, no.” He felt guilty for saying something that mean. But he was done trying to persuade her. He’d held back for years. He had nothing to lose. She was forcing him to leave. Making her mad was the least of his concerns.

Lisa just sat there crying. She couldn’t believe this was happening. After a few seconds, Grant realized he was being mean to her. He didn’t mean to do that. He had just slipped. Years of frustration were coming out. He regretting being sarcastic like that.

The fact that he had all that food and a gun picked out just for her made her mad. What an asshole, she thought. He was just trying to win an argument. Trying to make her look bad.

Grant was getting impatient. “I gotta go,” he said. “I will load up my car with the last of my stuff and head out.” That was it. The goodbye to their whole lives. Twenty five years of being inseparable. Having kids. Struggling through having an autistic child, law school, medical school, all the normal marriage bumps in the road. Dreaming about living the American Dream together and hopefully retiring some day in wealth and comfort. And it came down to this. Grant just walking out of the bedroom, leaving her crying. Leaving her and packing his stuff into the car. And, he didn’t regret it.

He was just calmly doing what needed to be done. It was simultaneously the end of the world and a relief. He told himself, you tried. You tried hard. People make choices. She is making a choice. Dying is too high a price to pay for a pretty girl. Then he thought about what would probably happen to her in the city as it slipped into even more lawlessness. He knew what it would be. But he couldn’t think about it. It was like she wasn’t his wife anymore; she was just a woman crying in his bedroom.

Grant couldn’t face the kids. They knew something was up. The sound of a mom crying will do that. He needed to talk to Manda. She needed to understand that he wasn’t abandoning them. Good luck with that, he thought.

Grant popped his head into Manda’s bedroom. “Manda, I need to go.” He was talking loud enough for Lisa to hear. She needed to hear this.

“I have asked your mom to come to the cabin,” he said in the artificially calm voice he had been using. “You know all the stuff we have there. She won’t do it. She can’t believe all this is happening. She’s not a bad person, just someone who can’t process all the horrible things that are happening. You guys can always come out and join me. We have plenty of food out there. Take care of your mom and your little brother.”

Manda was quietly crying. She looked up at her dad and said “Can I come with you?”

What? Grant wanted Manda and Cole to come so badly, but wouldn’t that be “kidnapping”? Grant felt awful enough “abandoning” his wife, but kidnapping their kids? That was too much.

“Honey, Mom needs you,” he said as he went over to Manda’s bed and hugged her. “Your brother especially needs you. I would love for you to come with me, but you need to be with them.” He was so tempted to take Manda. And Cole. So tempted. But he couldn’t bring himself to kidnap them. They’d be better off if he did; he just couldn’t do it.

“Grandma and grandpa will be here and they’ll help you,” Grant said. Lisa’s parents lived in Olympia now. “I don’t want to get the whole family in trouble with the government so I’m…”

Leaving? He couldn’t say the word. “So I have to go.” Grant wanted to tell Manda things would get better in a few days and that the Collapse would be over. But he knew she was too smart for that. Saying it would just blow his credibility with her.

By now, Manda was bawling. Grant hugged her, tight, like it was their last hug ever, and whispered in her ear, “Try to get your mom to come out to the cabin. Please try. It’s not your fault if she doesn’t come, but please try. Please.” Grant let go of her and walked out of the room. He felt horrible leaving his daughter this way. “Love you, dear. You’re the best daughter in the world.” He thought that was a better set of last words. He had to go.

He also needed to say goodbye to Cole. Innocent little Cole who just wanted to be tucked in every night by his dad. That would never happen again. That was the hardest part of all of this. No more tucking Cole.

Cole was crying because, despite not being able to understand everything he was hearing, he knew that Mom and Dad were really mad at each other. He understood that Dad was going away. He wondered if he had done something wrong to make his Dad leave.

Grant came into Cole’s room. “Hey, little buddy, I need to go for a while. But I will come back as soon as I can. Or, better yet,” Grant knew Lisa was listening, “you, Sister, and Mom can come see me out at the cabin.” Grant thought he’d take a risk here: “Would you like to come to the cabin, little buddy?”

“Why don’t you stay here?” Cole asked in between sobs.

“I need to go,” Grant said. That is all Grant could think to say. He couldn’t say that the police might be after him or that gangs might be coming back or that society was collapsing. “I need to go” was all he could come up with.

“When are you coming back?” Cole asked, still crying.

“Soon,” Grant said. “As soon as I can. Actually, I bet you and Mommy and Sister come to see me out at the cabin. Bring your video games and movies. You can play with them out there. It will be fun, just like it always is when you come out there. You can throw rocks in the water like we do. Come out and your Dad will be there, OK?”

Cole nodded. Grant hugged his little man. God, that felt good. He would miss his son. Forever.

Grant walked out of Cole’s room, and knew he couldn’t leave without saying something to Lisa. He owed her that.

He went into their room—now, Grant, thought “her” room—and said, “You can come out any time you want. Just call me and I’ll come get you. No matter how dangerous it is. I want us to be together. I just can’t be here. It’s too dangerous. I will never say ‘I told you so.’ Never. Please come out and let us be a family again.”

She just bawled louder.

He never thought this was how they would leave each other. He assumed it would be on one of their deathbeds when they were old and gray. Not this way.