Sabotage (Powerless Nation Book 3) (4 page)

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I'm going to go home to cook dinner,” she said. “Apparently that's all I'm good for.”

“That's not what I—”

Dee walked away, weaving her way through the crowd until she reached the door, and fled into the chilly afternoon.

CHAPTER FOUR

D
INNER
THAT
NIGHT
WAS
a disaster. Angry and distracted, Dee didn’t soak the beans or cook the rice long enough, so they were hard and crunchy. After a few bites, Ted cleared his throat to say something.
 

“Don’t eat it if you don’t like it!” Dee snapped before he could speak. She stomped away from the table, ignoring her mom’s pleas for her to come back.

When she tried to slam the door of her bedroom it wouldn’t close — a pair of jeans was in the way. She kicked them to one side and gave the door a satisfying slam.

At the farmhouse, Dee would have spent the hours after dinner in the living room near the wood-burning stove. Someone might read aloud, or they’d take turns making up cheesy jokes. Everyone was learning to knit, and they worked on over-sized hot pads that might eventually become scarves. At bedtime, they would build up the fire and settle in for the long, cold, winter night.
 

 
Tonight, Dee refused to spend a cozy night with her family. Her mind raced. Was her dad blind? She needed to learn to defend herself. She could help protect the town and her family, and herself.

She tossed on the new bed in the chilly, unfamiliar room. Her mom laughed at one of her dad’s jokes and she grimaced.
Traitor
, she thought.
 

She missed Mason. He would understand.

Before long the door opened and Sena came in. “Hey, are you asleep?”
 

“No,” said Dee, rolling over to face her. Sena was Dee’s age, but smaller and shy. She had long, straight hair and serious eyes behind thick glasses. Dee wondered if she missed her friend Kade as much as Dee missed Mason.

“I thought you might like to know how the rest of the meeting went after you left,” said Sena.

The way she spoke often reminded Dee of an apology, and Dee got the impression she expected someone to yell at her. She wondered what kind of family life Sena had had before the EMP.

Dee shrugged. “I guess.”

“We talked about the militia for a while. They made plans for training and stuff.”

Dee snorted. “Are you here to rub my face in it? I suppose my dad is going to let you join?”

Sena shook her head. “I’m not really interested.”

“Don’t you want to learn to fight? We need to be able to protect ourselves.”

Sena sat quietly for a minute. After a long moment she said, “Have you ever seen what a bullet does to a body?”

“Yeah, Hyrum got shot in the leg a few weeks ago.”

“Not like that. That bullet didn’t even go in, did it? I thought it just grazed him.”

Dee shrugged. “I guess.”

“I had a friend on the cruise ship that got shot. Terrorists came on board, and they shot into a crowd of people with automatic weapons.”

“That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about,” insisted Dee. “If you were armed and trained with a gun I bet that wouldn’t have happened.”

“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” said Sena flatly. “It’s not like a little bit of training on a handgun or rifle is going to protect a person from hate and fear.”

Sena fell silent, and Dee thought back to when her grandpa shot Mason’s stepdad. She thought about the way Hank’s body had looked afterward. Like ground beef.

Dee didn’t like to think about that. “I’ve seen someone shot,” she said quietly.

Sena nodded and the two girls sat on Dee’s bed without speaking, lost in their own thoughts.

Finally Dee asked, “So did they talk about anything else interesting at the meeting?”

Sena didn’t take her eyes off her hands. “Some of the people in town want to reopen school for the younger kids.”

“Good for them. It’ll keep the kids busy.”

 
Sena glanced at Dee from the corner of her eye. “They want us to help teach it.”

Dee’s attention snapped immediately to Sena. “They want
us
to teach? You and me?”

Sena’s head moved the barest fraction in acknowledgement.

“Whatever,” said Dee. “I can’t be a teacher. I haven’t even graduated from high school.”

“You know how to read and do math, right?”

“I’m awful with kids.”

“I saw you with Katy and Sammy, and with the kids at the health clinic. You’ll be great. Kids love you.”

“Are they going to pay us?”

“Not exactly,” said Sena.

“Figures.”

“They’ll feed us and the kids lunch, though, and give us supplies.”

“Count me out,” said Dee.

Sena shifted uncomfortably.
 

“What?” asked Dee.

“Nothing.”

“What is it?” insisted Dee.

Sena hesitated. “Your dad… he, uh… he already said you’d do it.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Dee crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, he’s just going to have to tell them I won’t.” She raised her voice knowing it would carry into the living room. “I won’t do it!”

“Maybe you should give it a try,” Sena suggested. “I think it’s going to be fun. They’re even going to reopen the library.” The light from the lamp reflected in Sena’s eyes and they appeared to shine. “I can’t even tell you how much I’ve missed having a library. We’re going to have school there because it’s smaller and easier to heat and so we can have access to the books.”

Dee had never seen Sena so animated. “You’re really excited about this, aren’t you?”

“Books have always been my friends, you know? If I can teach kids to read, and give them stories that will show them how life used to be, or take their minds off what it’s like now? Well, yeah, I’m excited.”

“I can see why my mom likes you so much.”

Sena paused before responding. “Is it okay I’m here? I don’t want you to feel like I’m trying to take your place.”

“Yeah, of course. You wouldn’t want my place anyway. You’ve seen how things are with me and my parents.”

“I have, and I think you’re lucky. I’d have given a lot to grow up in a family like yours.”

Dee looked at Sena for a long moment and then nodded. “I am pretty lucky. Sometimes I forget. I guess I could try being a schoolteacher, pass out a few worksheets and read some books. I mean, how bad could it be?”

*

They decided to split the students up by age. Sena took the younger students.
 

She has a real gift for it
, Dee thought, remembering how Sena had helped Sammy sound out
Hop on Pop
.

Dee was supposed to teach the middle-school aged kids. Their group met in a conference room at the back of the library. A wall of windows faced out on a wooded area near the edge of town. When the students came in and Dee realized some of them were almost as old as she was, she longed to sneak into the trees and back home to the farm with Mason.

“My name is Miss Dee,” she said.

“Misty?” asked one of the boys, and snickered knowingly.

Dee was tempted to roll her eyes and call him a name. She wrote her name on the whiteboard like she’d seen the teacher do in an episode of
Little House on the Prairie
. Claire loved the show and Dee had seen more episodes than she cared to admit.

There were nine kids in her class, and they looked anywhere from eight to fourteen years old. She told each child to introduce themselves. They were to state their name, grade, and favorite subject.

The first boy was named Harvey. He was thin (they were all thin, but Harvey was made entirely of narrow lines and sharp angles) and had a sprinkling of freckles to go with fine, straight hair cut into distractingly crooked bangs.

“I’m Harvey Moss,” he said. Dee wrote it in her notebook. “I’m in fifth grade, and I used to like chemistry but now I want to learn about animal trapping.”

Dee knew nothing about either of those things. She wrote them both in her book and looked at the next student, another boy.

“I’m Jeremy Booker and I’m in fifth grade too. I like to read and I want to learn how to make candles that will last all night.”

Dee said, “It might not be a good idea to let candles burn all night. That could be a fire hazard.”

“I get nightmares,” said Jeremy in a quiet voice with his eyes fixed on the ground. Other students nodded in agreement and Dee felt a pang of sympathy.

She wrote ‘Candlemaking’ in her book. “Okay, next.”

Jamie and Wynona were twins in eighth grade. “We want to know more about the Revolutionary War and we’re good at math.” Dee was relieved to hear that at least a few students were interested in normal school subjects. Wynona added, “We also want to learn to shoot a gun.”

Join the club
, thought Dee. The other students had similar interests, and most of them were interested in learning survival skills.

“Is it true you shot the sheriff?” asked Harvey, interrupting the roll call.

The melody of a song she hadn’t heard in months popped into Dee’s head. She resisted the urge to sing.

“I was there when he was shot, but I didn’t shoot him, no.”
Or his deputy
, she couldn’t help adding under her breath.

“Why not?” asked Jamie. “Were you too scared?”

“I
was
scared, but I didn’t shoot him because I didn’t know how to use my gun.”

“So Doc Kerns shot him, right?” said Wynona. “We asked our dad to take us out shooting before he got sick, but he said we didn’t have enough bullets to spare.”

Dee looked at the clock and sighed. Only twenty minutes had passed. This day was going to last forever.

She supposed they should get started. Max had brought her a pile of language arts and math books from the school, and told her she was to teach the lessons from those texts.
 

Dee glanced around at the faces of the kids in front of her. They were gaunt, tired. Dark shadows bruised the pale skin under their eyes. Their eyes were the worst. The kids in her class were far too young to have such haunted eyes. For a moment she wondered what her own looked like.

She picked up a math book and opened it to a lesson at random. Being a teacher wasn’t something she’d ever claimed to be good at but she’d give it a shot. “Today we’re going to talk about fractions. You guys should have all learned something about fractions by now, right?”

The kids drooped in their chairs. She looked at the problems and then back up at the class. This was never going to work if she taught straight out of the book.

“All right,” said Dee, an idea beginning to form. “Who knows what a common denominator is?”

“It’s when the bottom numbers of two fractions are the same,” answered Wynona, speaking mechanically.

“Right,” said Dee. “But it means something else too. It means something we all have in common. For example, none of us have electricity, right? That’s a common denominator in this group.”

“I know a common denominator we have. We all know someone that died,” said a girl named Kylie. Dee nodded, thinking they needed therapy a lot more than they needed school.
 

“Another common denominator we have is that we want to learn how to survive. If we have to go to school, maybe we can all learn something useful. Let’s start at the top of the list of things you said you’re interested in learning, and each day we’ll research and try out a different survival skill. I’m sure the library has books about most of this stuff.” Dee relaxed when the kids brightened. Some of them were even smiling. This was the kind of education they all needed.

She glanced at her notebook. “Today we’re going to learn about… animal trapping. Let’s get started.”
 

Maybe teaching school wouldn’t be so bad after all.

CHAPTER FIVE

S
CHOOL
HAD
ONLY
BEEN
in session for a few days, but Dee thought it was going pretty well. The class had read about making soap and candles. She taught the kids what Mason had showed her about building a solar oven, and they all learned to either knit or crochet.

One day they went behind the school and studied animal tracks in the snow. Several trails led through the woods, and they identified fresh rabbit tracks. Dee had made it a point to look up bear tracks in the book and she kept an eye out for them. She knew bears hibernated during the winter and probably wouldn’t come near the town, but she hadn’t forgotten her experience with a bear the previous fall.

After learning about tracking, it made sense to try their luck at trapping. The class fashioned several noose traps and a couple of deadfall traps and placed them on the animal trails behind the school. The students checked them several times each day. Although they hadn’t caught anything yet, Dee thought it was only a matter of time before they trapped a rabbit or other small animal.

One morning while they walked the trap line they could hear an animal yowling and struggling in the undergrowth. “I think we got one!” said Harvey. He and some of the boys ran ahead. Dee walked hand in hand with McKenna, the youngest girl in class.

Dee hoped they’d put the trapped animal out of its misery before she arrived, but no such luck. She found the group of boys huddled around something and asked, “What’s wrong, Harvey?”
 

He turned to her, his eyes troubled. “It’s not a rabbit.”

“That’s okay. A squirrel would make a good stew, or a possum.” She could hear the animal crying. “Does anyone have a big stick? Let’s get this over with.”

The crowd of boys parted, and McKenna tightened her grip on Dee’s hand when the trapped animal came into view.

It was a cat. A house cat, with thick, matted fur and a torn ear. It hissed at her.

Dee opened her mouth and shut it again, unsure what to do.

“I guess I’ll get a stick,” said Jamie.

“Oh no you won’t,” said Jamie’s twin, Wynona. “You can’t kill it. Poor thing. Look, it has a collar and everything. It’s someone’s pet.”

Jamie said, “How are we supposed to learn then?”