The Girl Who Owned a City Page 10

  “Now, in the afternoon, we’ll have special advanced classes. I know it sounds funny, but we all have to start planning for our full-time jobs. We’re teaching farming, medicine, defense, machinery, and building. Other courses will be added later.

  “Everyone must choose a job in one of these areas. Your morning teacher will help you decide. The afternoon classes won’t begin for a month, so you’ll have time to make up your mind. Any questions?” There were none, and Craig sat down.

  “Oh, yes,” he remembered, “during this week everyone must report to the strategy room after lunch. We’ve got a lot of planning to do—especially in defense.”

  “What is a strategy room?” asked Katy.

  “Come along and we’ll show you,” said Jill.

  It was a strange-looking room with a lot of black-boards and maps of Glen Ellyn. On the far wall were photos and drawings of Glenbard and the land around it. On the long table, there was a plan of the school that showed the rooms and halls. There were about 40 toy soldiers sitting on the table.

  Charlie was the new militia general.

  “Strategy,” Charlie said, “means planning. In this room, we will pretend in advance how battles might go so that we’ll be ready to fight them. See these play soldiers on the table? Now, we can pretend that the enemy has entered the building at this door over here.” He pointed to a place on the drawing. “We’ll put these toy soldiers here to stand for the enemy. To plan our strategy, we can move our soldiers to different places on the drawing and decide the best way to handle this particular situation. By using the maps, blackboards, and other things, we can practice hundreds of different strategies.”

  Charlie added, “Todd Nelson, Steve Cole, Kevin, and his three roommates will be my captains. Is that all perfectly clear?” He asked the question in a sharp, military tone. It sounded like something he’d learned while watching a war movie.

  They all understood. Katy said, “That sounds like a fun game. Can I play it too, sometime?”

  “War is not a game!” replied the tough new general.

  Jill and Lisa led them from the strategy room to the library. “This library has books mainly for older kids, so we’re going to take the truck to the Glen Ellyn library and move their books over here. Eventually, we’ll have six rooms of library space.

  “After the city is built, we can have candles after dark. Then you can come here to read during the evening.”

  Next, they showed them the game room, which didn’t look much like a game room yet. There were just a few toys, but Jill and Lisa promised to fill the room by the time Glenbard was finished.

  There were many other rooms. Three rooms next to the cafeteria were for storing food, and two just down the hall were for supplies. There was a special room with huge wooden bars and several padlocks. “Here’s where we’ll store our guns and bombs and things like that,” said Jill.

  Later they would prepare other rooms: the automobile shop for fixing cars, the woodworking classroom for building things, and the home economics room for cooking classes.

  There were many more plans for the city. But for now, their lives would be simple. Defense and food supplies were their biggest problems. These must be taken care of before anything else.

  Julie and Nancy made the first morning meal at Glenbard out of soup and powdered milk. After lunch, Lisa, Jill, and Craig organized the others into work groups. There was a lot to be done, and no time to waste.

  Lisa and Jill had done a good job of preparation. Everyone could see that they had already put in many late-night hours of hard work. The city already seemed like a cozy place.

  By six, the Glenbard citizens had sore muscles and feet, but they were also excited and happy about their new home. Lisa could hear it in their playful whispers. “Quiet down now . . . get to sleep . . . no candles!” She made an inspection of the family rooms.

  That night, Lisa had a private talk with each of the family leaders. “Do you understand the rules? Our lives depend on total quiet and secrecy. I am trusting you to take charge of this room. Come to me the minute something, even the slightest thing, seems wrong. Make sure that no one moves from their beds until I come by again in the morning.”

  From outside, Glenbard was still a deserted old high-school building. There were no signs of life.

  But there was a light—a secret light—in Glenbard. A small candle burned in a tower room that had been carefully sealed. Wooden panels covered the window and the door to the hall. The edges of the panels were taped shut with black tape. From the outside, the room was as lightless as a coffin.

  The secret room was for Glenbard’s council. The chamber would glow inside for many, many nights to come. It was here, in endless meetings, that the leaders would shape the future of the city. The candle’s light painted shadows across their faces as they sat whispering around the small table.

  Lisa was in charge of these conferences. Tonight they were discussing the old problem of making a defense plan. None of them liked to talk about it, but it had to be done. And the new plan had to be good.

  Looking at her notes, Lisa made her defense proposal. “The way I see it, the first thing to do is to seal this place up so that no one could possibly get in. I’m talking about steel and bolts, not wood and nails. We should put solid steel covers over the inside of every door and window. I noticed that all the doors in the gym and bathrooms are made of metal. We can use them.”

  “Hey, I know,” said Craig. “In the auto shop classroom, there’s some welding equipment. My Uncle Elliot was a welder. I don’t think you need electricity to work it. You just light the end of the torch and gas comes from the tank. There are lots of tanks down there.” It didn’t make sense to Lisa right away.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Well, we could weld the metal doors to the steel window frames. Nothing is stronger than welding!” he explained.

  “What’s wrong with bars?” asked Jill. “It will be awfully dark in here if the windows are all covered over. I wouldn’t like that.”

  “It’s not what we like that counts right now,” Craig said. “Anyway, with bars someone could throw firebombs inside or spy on us.”

  “It sounds all right to me,” said Lisa. She thought for a moment. “But just think of the work it would take. There must be a thousand windows in this place.” She thought again. “Why not just the first floor for now? Then Jill can have her light up here. Our other defenses, I think, will take care of the upper stories. We don’t want any changes to be seen from the outside till the very last minute. Craig, can you get it all set up first—everything cut and fitted and ready to go so we can put them all up on the last night?”

  “I think I can,” he said.

  “Well, check it out and report to us tomorrow night.”

  Their plans were very detailed. They tried to consider every possibility and take no chances. The mistakes of Grandville were mentioned. This time they wanted to be sure.

  They spent hours and hours plotting defense. On many nights they talked until daylight. The room quickly filled up with candy wrappers, piles of notes and drawings, and empty soda cans that covered the table and the floor. It was an odd feeling for them to walk out of the dark and messy chamber into the bright sunlight of the hall.

  The defense plan was taking shape. “Napoleon himself could learn from it,” Craig boasted one night.

  They would dig a secret tunnel entrance from the bushes and then through the hill on Lake Road. Charlie’s dogs would be an important part of the plan. “You’d better give us a progress report soon. Let’s keep the dogs away from here till they’re trained. We can collect them at the airport, maybe in a hangar,” said Lisa. She could easily imagine the dogs barking all night and giving them away.

  But the roof defense was the main part of the plan. There’d be a dozen sentries on duty at all times. Dressed in black, and wearing black masks, they’d each patrol about 200 feet of roof line. A small storage shed near each sentry’s station
would hold guns, ammunition, and a hundred Molotov cocktails.

  The brick-wall rim of the flat roof was a perfect shield. There were spaces in the rim for guns to rest on, just like the ramparts of a real castle. The rim was high enough to protect the sentries. Only their heads would show above it. The top of the barrier would be lined with bricks, glass fragments, and paper bags of sand. During an attack, the sentry could run on a board along the edge and shower the enemy with missiles.

  The children invented a very dangerous weapon for serious attacks. They put drums of oil next to each sentry shed. These could be heated over wood fires, and pails of the boiling oil could be poured over the rim of the roof onto any enemies brave enough to scale the walls.

  At half-hour intervals during the night, each sentry would drop a stone to the ground from his station. If the dogs stirred or barked at the sound, the sentry would know that all was well and that the guardians below were alert and ready.

  All these plans made up just a small part of Glenbard’s total defenses. After the Glenbard flag was raised and the city was ready, nothing would harm them. There would be no need for face-to-face fighting. The children could defend their home without going over the wall. All they had to do was keep watch and, if necessary, drop things on their attackers.

  In the night, the citizens of Glenbard slipped silently from the fortress and went to all the hidden parts of Glen Ellyn, loading, looting, training, and even spying. They moved about in silence.

  After the first week, the old high school still seemed deserted. Where are the children of Grand Avenue? old friends and enemies wondered.

  At the same time, things were changing mysteriously around town. It was puzzling to the other children. “Hey, where did that big pile of sand go?” they’d ask one another. “It was in front of the lumber yard yesterday.” Or, “Look! Someone’s been in the library . . . the shelves are almost empty.” Or, “I thought I heard someone outside the house last night, and then I heard dogs barking. It was scary. It sounded like a hundred dogs barking all at once.”

  The night council meetings continued. “We’ll never have it ready on schedule,” Lisa complained one night, in the second week of their work. “Charlie, how’s your dog training coming along?”

  “Okay, I guess, but I haven’t been able to work at it for four days,” he explained. “When there’s snow on the roads, we can’t go out. Our tracks will lead the enemy right to our door.”

  “Good thinking,” Lisa complimented him. “I’m sure glad you thought of that! Don’t take any chances. We just can’t make any dumb mistakes.

  “Okay,” she continued, bringing the meeting to a new topic. “I want to talk about an idea that I had last night. There is safety in numbers, and we haven’t come close to filling this place up. We just rattle around. There’s too much work to do and too few kids to do it. Besides, it would be much safer if people were living in all parts of the building.”

  “Get to the point, Lisa,” said Craig. He was tired. It had been a long day.

  She glared at him for a moment. “It’s just that I haven’t thought it through very well. But I think we should fill Glenbard with people. I want to rent parts of our fortress to other kids.”

  “Uh-oh, here she goes again,” said Craig to Jill. “I can’t take this. I’m going to bed.”

  “Stay where you are. It’s important,” Lisa said. Jill was silent.

  “You see, we’ve got something special here. Safety—and many things that other kids don’t have, like the library, the gym, and the supplies.

  “After Glenbard is finished, we can go around Glen Ellyn telling kids about the nice life they could have here. If they can follow our rules and do their share of the work, we could let them join us. They’ll pay us with their work.”

  “Yes,” said Jill. “I think you’re right. In fact, I’m sure you’re right. Just think of how much easier things would be. Julie and Nancy would have help with the cooking. And we’d have more friends, more new ideas . . . and fewer possible enemies, because they’d be in with us, instead of out there joining gangs.”

  “But that’s the problem,” Craig said, still in his bad mood. “When we start adding people, they’ll bring new problems with them. How many of them will be spies? How many arguments will we have about rules and things? Suppose some group of kids decides to take over? And don’t forget, more people eat more food.”

  He was right about the spy danger, and Lisa knew it. But she defended her idea. “I’ve thought a lot about those problems and I’m sure we can solve them. First, we’ll have a list of rules for the new people, and they’ll have to sign an agreement, like a contract.”

  “I think we should just take families we know personally,” said Jill. “That way we’d be safer. I can think of at least a dozen families I know of that we could trust, and so could every other kid.

  “How many people do you think we should plan for, Lisa?” Jill asked.

  “Well,” she answered carefully, “I think we should start really small, just to see what problems come up. Let’s say, for example, that we took in three families to start with—no more than a dozen new kids altogether. That would give my plan a good test, and we could grow from there.”

  Craig seemed encouraged by the idea. His harsh look faded.

  Lisa went on. “I have been studying the floor plan of Glenbard, and it seems to me that we might eventually have a city of about 800.”

  Craig got up and left the room. “Eight hundred,” he muttered to himself. “Eight hundred!” He felt like swearing out loud.

  “He’s really mad, Lisa.” Jill started after him.

  “Wait, Jill. Let him go. I’ll talk to him when he cools off a little. Something else is bothering him, I can tell. He’s been acting strange. I hate to say it, but I don’t think he likes it here. He’s probably got the farm on his mind again!”

  The two girls talked about Lisa’s new idea in detail. It seemed to have endless possibilities. “As soon as the city is finished, we’ll go out and talk to some families,” Jill said. “We’ll each find one. Three families will make a good test.”

  “Yes, but let’s not talk about it with Craig much. We’ll wait and let him get interested on his own. Maybe he’ll see that it would mean more students for his school and more teachers, too. And even more farmers, for that matter.”

  The two girls stared at the candle for some time, thinking about the new plan. Finally Jill spoke, changing the subject.

  “Lisa, why do you keep calling it your city—saying that it’s your property?”

  “Because it is! I thought I told everyone that on the very first day.”

  “But we’ve all helped to build it, haven’t we?” argued Jill. “The kids are starting to call you selfish. They don’t like it when you call it yours. They want to own it too.”

  “Selfish? I guess I am. But there’s more to it than that. Don’t forget, it was my discovery. The place was just sitting here empty, belonging to no one. I found it, I planned it, I filled it with my supplies, and now I run it.

  “Nobody else seems to want my job, you know. Craig will probably wind up going off to his farm. And you’ll leave too, someday, and start your hospital. Will it be selfish for him to own his own farm? Will people call him selfish for selling the crops from his farm?

  “Why should this be any different? At first, I didn’t think it made any difference at all, but then I started to imagine what would happen to Glenbard if more than one person was in charge. If a city belonged to no one in particular, it wouldn’t get anywhere!

  “No, Jill. I know that you like to share things, but it just doesn’t work out the way you’d like it to. In the first place, nothing would ever get done. With no one in charge and no one to make decisions, the group would argue all the time about whose property should be shared. And then everybody would be squabbling about how to divide things up, and they’d be too busy to accomplish anything.

  “I do own this place, and I don’t force
anyone to stay. I didn’t force you or anyone else to come here. It’s a free thing. I’m willing to take the worries and the responsibility, but I’ll keep control, thanks.

  “Call me selfish all you like, but I don’t want to own anybody. I don’t want anyone to own me, and that’s what a sharing group wants to do.”

  Jill didn’t feel like arguing. “Well, anyway,” she said, “I think you’re in for trouble if you keep calling it your city.”

  Lisa considered her next words carefully. “Freedom is more important than sharing, Jill. This is my city. I plan to run it well and build it into something good. But I have to do it the way I think is best.”

  Jill left Lisa alone in the tower chamber. Jill was angry, like Craig, though her thoughts about Lisa weren’t as critical as his. She sure is stubborn, thought Jill. I hope she doesn’t regret it!

  Lisa’s thoughts were more harsh. I’m not being very smart, she told herself. I need their help, and it’s dumb to make them angry. I suppose I can talk more about our city, if that will make them happy. But I can’t lose control. If I’m ever going to rebuild things, it’s got to start with this city. To fill Glenbard with more people would be good for every one of us. It would make life safer and easier.

  But she also began to see her job more clearly. She would have to work hard to earn her goals. She’d have to offer something better to the children than they could find anywhere else. Like in the kingdom of Real Fun, she thought, smiling.

  Lisa didn’t sleep that night, except for brief moments in front of the candle, when her head rested on her crossed arms.

  On the night of January 16, the ghostly old school building came mysteriously to life. Lights filled the upstairs windows, and there was joyous shouting and excitement on the roof. The glow of a dozen torches dotted the roof line. Horns blared, and a hundred dogs below barked as if to drown out the sounds above them. To the silent audience below, Glenbard looked like a castle.