Outage (Powerless Nation #1) (16 page)

At dinner, Morty ladled bowls of soup for everyone while he explained how the temporary mail would work. “We're counting on people to help us right now. Say, for example, you decide you're going to leave town – we'd want you to stop by the post office first and tell us where you're going. If we've got letters that need to go that way we'll give you a bag and you can take them. Hopefully as people pass through town they'll have letters for us that they'll bring by the post office, and I'll take them around as often as I can. We've got a few dedicated letter carriers willing to make the long haul, but that's a lot to ask. Most of us want to stay closer to home.”

“Aren't you worried about security?” asked Grandpa.

“Some,” answered Morty, loudly slurping a noodle and smacking his lips. “Hank's offered me whatever protection he can manage.”

“Seems risky to me,” said Grandpa.

“It's a good idea,” said Angela. She hadn't taken a bowl of soup for herself. Instead, she was busily writing. Dee was sure she was writing to her oldest son. Dee set her own bowl aside when she was done and tore a page out of a notebook. She wanted to write to her parents, but what could she say?

She glanced at Mr. Mortimer to see if he was ready to leave, but he was busily refilling his bowl to the brim and asking Grandpa about the farm and the animals. Dee sat on the couch and looked again at the blank page in front of her. As months passed with no sign of them, Dee had begun to give up hope. She told herself it would be better not to expect them at all, so if they never came it wouldn't hurt as much. She had so much to tell them, but putting anything down on paper felt like hoping for too much.

Dee looked up as Hyrum sat next to her. “What's wrong?” he whispered, looking at her blank sheet of paper.

“What if I write this and they never get it?” she said. “I don't even know where to address it.”

Hyrum thought for a minute and then said, “Do you remember that scene in the third Indiana Jones movie? Where he’s standing in front of a bottomless pit, and to save his dad he has to cross it?

For once, Dee knew which movie Hyrum was talking about. She could see it in her mind. Harrison Ford with his leg held out stiffly in front of him, looking like he was about to step off the edge of a cliff. Prepared to take –
 

“A leap of faith,” she said out loud.

“Sometimes you've just got to take the leap.” Hyrum smiled at her and Dee felt a warm reassurance as he added, “It's going to be okay.” And somehow, for a minute, she believed him. She picked up her pencil and began to write.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A
FTER
M
ORTY
LEFT
WITH
their letters and a dozen eggs packed carefully in dry grass, Grandpa and Angela washed the dishes while the kids played Charades in the living room. Jeremiah had them all in stitches doing an impression of Mr. Mortimer licking his soup bowl clean.

Dee wandered into the kitchen to offer to help and inadvertently overheard a conversation.

“I don't like it, Angela. He's been in the house, he knows how we're set for winter.” Grandpa took a bowl from her and dried it before putting it in the cupboard.

“I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt. He's a good man. We can't suspect him just because he looked hungry.”

“We have to suspect him,” said Grandpa. “We've got young'uns here that need protecting, and Morty said it himself – hunger changes people.”

“All right, so he's hungry. That doesn't mean he's involved with those thieves.” Angela scrubbed fiercely at a bowl that already looked clean. “Plus, if he was that hungry he wouldn’t have shared his food with us.”

“I completely agree, but right now there's no way to know, and we need to do what's best for the kids.”

Angela sighed and leaned against the sink, shoulders slumped. “Fine, I'll tell the boys we're moving in for the winter. We'll bring our things tomorrow.”

The next day as soon as Dee got a chance, she got Hyrum and Mason together and told them what she'd overheard.

“Morty? One of the bad guys?” said Hyrum, doubt clear in his eyes, “That sounds like paranoia.”

“Think about it though,” said Mason. “He's the perfect choice for a lead man. People know him and trust him.
We
let him in, didn't we? Now he knows the layout of the house, and he knows that we've got food and livestock and guns.”

“What if he is with them? Our storage would be a huge score for a group like that, and so would the animals. How do we protect them?” asked Dee.

The three put their heads together and came up with some ideas. After they presented them to Grandpa and Angela a few modifications were made and then the teens got to work.

The first thing they did was prepare a place to hide the bulk of their supplies. There was already quite a bit of food in the house, and with the addition of the Searles and their food, it was imperative they get it out of sight. Dee had never noticed, but under the mat in the pantry was a trapdoor leading to a dank and musty cellar.

“This is perfect,” breathed Mason, shining his flashlight around the space. “No one will ever suspect this room is down here.” The walls of the windowless room were lined with old wooden shelves. Mason inspected them and pronounced them solid, so after they cleaned them up they started bringing the food storage down.

Hyrum and his brothers made multiple trips, lugging huge canisters into the house in a strange procession of things like hard red wheat, dehydrated apples, nonfat dried milk, potato pearls, and more.

Dee watched in amazement and finally stopped Hyrum as he walked by with a five-gallon bucket labeled macaroni. “Is your mom a little crazy? Who has twenty pounds of macaroni?”

Hyrum grinned good-naturedly, “Was Noah a little crazy when he built the ark? Guess who was laughing when the rain started?”

“Glad to have you on board, Noah.”

They left just enough food in the pantry to make it seem like it was all they had, but the majority of the storage was now hidden beneath the trapdoor.
 

Mason wanted to rig up some kind of alarm so they'd know if someone brought a vehicle down the lane. He spent several days foraging through Grandpa's house and the Searles’ to come up with the supplies he needed. Dee thought he looked happier than a little boy on Christmas morning when she found a spool of insulated wire in a shoebox under the kitchen sink. He swung her around until she was dizzy and then kissed her on the cheek. “You're an angel,” he declared.

Mason strung the wire from the house as far as it would reach along the side of the lane and then created a trip-wire that stretched across the lane. If someone or something crossed the trip-wire it pulled a slender piece of wood out from between an alligator clip with wires wrapped around both handles, which ran to a battery. If the piece of wood was yanked out and the wires connected, the battery sent a signal down the length of the wire to the house where it rang the doorbell.

They were all relieved when Mason finally got the alarm system working properly. It was nice knowing it would be harder for someone to sneak up on them in the night, but everyone was especially glad the development phase was over and Mason's system was no longer ringing the doorbell constantly and sending the dog into crazy barking sprees.

Jasper was also excited to have the Searles living with them. Sammy had to hold the recovering dog tightly around the neck so he wouldn't run up and down the stairs while Angela cleaned out the upstairs bedrooms and moved her family in. Dee got to keep her room, Angela and Katy shared a room, and Sammy, Jeremiah and Joseph were all in the third. Although the fourth bedroom had beds for Hyrum and Mason, they talked the adults into letting them sleep out in the barn to keep an eye on the animals.

“It's all right for now,” said Grandpa, “and we can see how it goes.”

Even though the house felt crowded and loud, there were a lot of benefits of having the Searles living with them. From Dee's point of view, her chore load was quite a bit easier now that she had Angela to share the big jobs like cooking, cleaning and especially laundry.
 

It turned out that the dishwasher wasn't the appliance Dee missed most – it was the washing machine. When she'd been alive, Grandma had decorated the laundry room with an old washboard and basin. Dee wondered why anyone that had used the items would ever view them as decorative. “More like torturous,” she muttered to herself as she scrubbed dirty clothes up and down over the bumpy surface of the washboard. Mason had hinted at an idea for a washing machine type invention, but when she saw that the prototype consisted of a bucket and a plunger, Dee sent him away. She refused to wash clothes with something that had been in the toilet.

Another thing Dee considered a benefit was getting to share in a Searle family tradition they called 'family home evening.' Every Monday night they all gathered in the living room and played games and spent time together. Each week different members of the family filled different assignments which included saying the opening and closing prayers, preparing a short lesson, choosing a game and making a treat. Dee had to work not to laugh the night Katy prayed, “Please bless that next week it will be Mom's turn to make the treat 'cause she's the only one that knows how to make brownies.”

The thing Dee enjoyed most about having the Searles around though was the music, and she knew Mason agreed. Each of the Searle kids played an instrument, and Angela insisted they continue practicing. Hyrum played the guitar, Jeremiah the violin, and Joseph could play the piano but preferred the harmonica. Even Katy had a set of bells upon which she was learning to play simple melodies. It wasn't unusual after dinner to have one or several of the Searles play while anyone could join in singing.

Somehow, Dee found that sharing in the closeness of the family helped soothe her own ache at the loss of her brother, and even to a certain extent, her fears and worries about her parents. She wished they could be there though, and see what a happy family was like from the inside.

Thanksgiving that year was unlike any Dee had ever had. On a typical Thanksgiving, her father spent the day engrossed in one football game after another, while her mom went over newspaper and online ads looking for deals and trying to score lightning deals on Amazon. Dee and Jacob typically watched the parade together on TV and then spent most of the day texting with their friends or playing computer games in their rooms. Dinner was a brief affair, which involved her mom re-heating a pre-packaged Thanksgiving meal. They ate together in the mostly unused dining room and made small talk. Looking back, Dee remembered looking forward to the holiday. Her whole family was at home, and even if they spent the day doing their own things at least they were there together.

This year, she experienced a completely different kind of Thanksgiving Day. Angela said that for one day they wouldn't be careful about food rationing and would have a real feast. Mason and Hyrum had gone hunting and actually found a wild turkey. It was small and lean, but they were very proud. The women had done much of the cooking in the days leading up to the holiday, so by Thursday they already had an apple pie and a pumpkin pie, a mountain of rolls, fresh butter and jam, and a sweet potato casserole waiting to go into the oven. The mashed potatoes and gravy had to be done right at the end, so while the bird cooked, they all hung out together.
 

They looked through photo albums and reminisced about family members that weren't there, and they told funny stories about things they remembered. It was emotional at times, especially for Mason and Sammy who had just lost their mom, but it felt good to Dee to talk about loved ones in a familiar way instead of carefully avoiding any mention of them.

Angela found a brown paper bag and carefully cut out a turkey head and body in the shape of a bowling pin, and then everyone traced their hands and colored them to be the turkey's tail feathers. On each finger, they wrote what they were thankful for and cut them out. After the project was assembled on the wall in the kitchen, Dee was both amused and touched to read what everyone was thankful for:

Jasper

the cattle guard

having enough to eat

being rescued

fresh milk

football

Angela because she is nice (from Sammy)

warm house

eternal families

no school

Grandpa

big woodpile

finding the truck

Jesus

the pump

toilet paper - wish we had some!

being alive

Dinner was a joyous feast and they all ate until they were stuffed. After dinner there were a lot of leftovers and Dee wished aloud they had someone to share with. Angela asked if she knew anyone that would be grateful for the food. Dee thought immediately of Courtney and her three little girls. They'd been on her mind lately, and Dee was worried they might be getting low on supplies. Grandpa and Angela said as long Mason and Hyrum went with her she could take the leftovers and a small care package to the family.

Dee carefully packed fresh eggs and milk, along with some rice, beans, flour and cornmeal. Then she added a coloring book, along with some markers and a candy bar. Her heart was light as they left the house and headed for Courtney's.

It was only a few miles, so the three teens walked. As they neared the house Dee was happy to see plant stalks in the frozen garden. Maybe Courtney had been able to grow some vegetables after all.

Dee’s mood changed as she looked more closely at the house. Neglect gave it an ominous air.
 

“I don't see any smoke from the chimney,” said Hyrum, stepping back to look.

“Do you think they left?” asked Mason.

“Maybe,” said Dee, unsure now. “Maybe her husband came back and they decided to leave.”

“I've got a bad feeling about this,” said Hyrum. Dee silently agreed.

She knocked on the door loudly and called, “Courtney, it's Dee. I watched your girls once, remember? I've got something for you.”

After a long pause, they heard the lock turn and the door opened a crack. “Now's not a good time,” said a shaky voice.