Dread Nation (Dread Nation #1)(58)

I watch Cora eat, and feel a little ill. There are no utensils to eat the porridge, so the options are use your hands or starve. The rest of our group stampeded to the trough like hogs because they knew there wouldn’t be enough food for everyone. And this is all after we were herded out to the work site.

Ida sidles up to me, her expression worried. “Watch out for Cora. She’s one of his favorites,” she says, eyes hooded as she watches the big girl reach into a boy’s bowl and scoop out a mouthful of porridge. “You want a little?” she asks, and I shake my head.

“No, you eat it. I ain’t all that hungry, anyway.” It’s a lie. I’m starving, but Ida is tiny, and she looks like she needs the food more than I do.

“Let’s go!” the sheriff yells from his horse, cracking a whip over our heads. Everyone shoves the rest of their porridge into their mouths and forms back up into their lines, bowls clutched in their hands.

Once again, we start running, our destination unclear. This time when everyone starts singing, I don’t join in.

We stop a short while later, our second run of the morning much shorter than our first. The ground is flat, the sun is already hot, and the grass is high, but I barely notice any of it on account of my aching feet. My boots are laced tight, and each step is painful, blisters already forming. I don’t even want to imagine what my feet look like under the leather.

The sheriff turns around and gives us all a steely gaze. “Fence menders, get to your business.” About half the boys and girls run off and each pick up a spool of bobbed wire, slinging it over their shoulder before they head off to a fence line a few hundred feet in the distance, the waist-high grass parting as they move through it. Cora is one of the fence menders. So fence mending must be easier than patrolling, if what Ida said about her being one of the sheriff’s favorites is true.

Beyond the fence, much closer now, is the imposing exterior wall. I’m guessing that’s where I’m bound.

“Patrol, go get your weapons.” The sheriff points to a ramshackle-looking shed, and this time I run out ahead of the group, ignoring my throbbing feet. I am not going to fight shamblers with a bowl.

I’m one of the first to the shed, Ida right behind me. When the girl next to me, Iris I think her name is, opens the door, my heart falls.

These ain’t weapons. They’re garden implements. There are several sets of sickles and quite a few scythes, but none of them have been cared for. The blades are rusty, the edges dull, and the pair of sickles I pick up ain’t even weighted properly. No wonder the girls on patrol don’t last long.

I grab the sickles and march over to Sheriff Snyder. I’ve had enough of this. I spent three years at Miss Preston’s honing my combat skills, refining my manners, getting an education. I ain’t no flunky to be prancing around the countryside just waiting to get bit. If I’m going out against shamblers, I need to be properly equipped.

“Sheriff, might I trouble you for a moment?”

The man looks down his nose at me, and his horse snorts and paws at the ground. “Why aren’t you lining up with your people?”

“Sir, I do believe you should know that these weapons are highly inadequate for any kind of patrol.” I hold up one of the sickles and point to the curved blade. “These haven’t been sharpened in ages, they are rusted, and I doubt they could cut through grass, much less a shambler’s neck.”

“Jane McKeene, I realize that you are new here, so I’m going to let you go back and have one of the girls explain how things work to you.”

“Sir, I ain’t going to need to know how things work when I’m dead from a shambler’s bite. Would you please look at this sickle?” I hold it up higher so that he can see what a disgrace his “weapons” are.

Quick as a snake, the sheriff’s boot lashes out, hitting me in the shoulder. I stumble backward, and something hits me in the back of the head. I drop the sickles, and as I fall to my knees someone kicks me again in the back, the boot digging deep between my ribs.

“Hold there, now Bill. She’s still gotta work.”

I climb shakily to my feet, rage coursing through my veins. The pain is a distant throb to my desire to do a little sickle work across Bill’s face.

Ida runs to my side. “Don’t worry, Sheriff, it won’t happen again. We’ll school her up right.”

The sheriff says nothing, just nods and spits, missing me by only a few inches. What is with these men and all their spitting?

Ida grabs my arms and whispers into my ear, “That right there is suicide. The sheriff is a whole lot of mean and not a lot of smart. You might as well poke a rattlesnake. Your death’d be easier.”

I say nothing, steeling my expression to blankness. I just pick up my sickles and storm over to where the rest of the girls gather.

I’m getting out of here. But before I do, I’m going to get a little payback of my own.





I trust you aren’t getting into too much mischief, Jane. You were always such an impetuous child, and I genuinely hope you aren’t letting your temper get the better of you.





Chapter 23


In Which I Taunt the Devil


The attack leaves me in a black mood for the rest of the day. I talk to no one, only opening my mouth to answer questions when asked. My job is to walk the top of the exterior wall.