A Plague Year

by Edward Bloor

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Edward Bloor

  Jacket art copyright © Alloy Photography/Veer

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission

  to reprint previously published material:

  The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC: Excerpt from “America’s Most Dangerous Drug,” Newsweek 8/8/2005, copyright © 2005 by The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC.

  All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC. Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.: Excerpt from “Frosty the Snowman,” words and music by Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins, copyright © 1950 by Hill and Range Songs, Inc., copyright renewed and assigned to Chappell & Co., Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bloor, Edward.

  A plague year / Edward Bloor. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A ninth-grader who works with his father in the local supermarket describes the plague of meth addiction that consumes many people in his Pennsylvania coal mining town from 9/11 and the nearby crash of United Flight 93 in Shanksville to the Quecreek Mine disaster in Somerset the following summer.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-98937-7

  [1. Methamphetamine—Fiction. 2. Drug abuse—Fiction. 3. Junior high schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Supermarkets—Fiction. 6. United Airlines Flight 93 Hijacking Incident, 2001—Fiction. 7. Coal mines and mining—Pennsylvania—Fiction. 8. Coal mine accidents—Pennsylvania—Fiction. 9. Pennsylvania—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B6236Pl 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010050651

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Amanda

  Frosty the Snowman knew the sun was hot that day.

  So he said, “Let’s run, and we’ll have some fun

  Before I melt away.”

  I wrote a journal last year, but it got destroyed. A lot of things got destroyed last year. So this is my best shot at bringing that journal back to life. It was supposed to cover one school year. Instead, it covers one of the most devastating things that can happen to a people, and to a place—a plague year.

  —Tom Coleman, March 27, 2002

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  September

  October

  November

  December

  Spring

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Newsweek—Anytown, USA, can be turned into a meth den almost overnight. Take Bradford County in northeast Pennsylvania, a place law-enforcement officials nationwide now refer to as “Meth Valley.” Five years ago a meth cooker from Iowa named Les Molyneaux set up shop in Towanda, a town of 3,000 along the Susquehanna River. Hardly anyone in Towanda had heard of the drug, but by the time Molyneaux was arrested and pleaded guilty in 2001 to conspiracy to manufacture meth, he’d shared his recipe with at least two apprentices. From there, “it just spread like wildfire,” says Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Casey. Today police have identified at least 500 people who are using or cooking the drug in Bradford County, and the actual tally is probably “significantly worse” than that, Casey says. The drug has seduced whole families and turned them into “zombies,” says Randy Epler, a police officer in Towanda. “I see walking death.”

  September

  Monday, September 10, 2001

  I was staring through the window of Dad’s van when I saw the shopping cart, stranded like a lost dog at the corner of Sunbury Street and Lower Falls Road. The green plastic trim and the white Food Giant logo identified it as one of ours. Maybe a customer had wheeled it, illegally, to a house around the corner, unloaded it, and then wheeled it back to that spot in an effort to say, I didn’t really steal this. I was just borrowing it. You can have it back now.

  Whatever. It wouldn’t be there for long. Bobby Smalls would pass this way in ten minutes. He would spot the cart and then comment bitterly about the person who had left it there, since he’d have to retrieve it as his first job of the day.

  Dad turned right and our van bumped across the dark expanse of blacktop in front of the supermarket. The Food Giant sign was still in its low-wattage setting, glowing like a rectangular night-light for the town of Blackwater. Dad is the general manager of this Food Giant, and he spends most of his waking life there. Although it was still an hour before opening and the lot was empty, he backed our Dodge Caravan into an outer space—a requirement for all employees. He asked, “Do you want me to leave it running, Tom?”

  “No. I’ll just open a window.”

  “Okay. I’ll leave the keys in case you change your mind. I’ll be about fifteen minutes, provided the system is up.”

  I yawned, “Okay,” and lowered the electric window before he could turn the key.

  Plan A was that Dad would drive me to school, which meant I would get there way early, before anybody, which meant that no one would see me being dropped off by a parent. This was infinitely better than plan B.

  In plan B, Mom would drop me off later, in front of everybody, which meant that I might as well be wearing a yellow patrol boy vest and carrying a Pokémon lunch box.

  But first we’d had to stop at the Food Giant because the Centralized Reporting System had been down the night before, so Dad hadn’t been able to input all his sales figures, reorders, et cetera, and send them to the corporate office. In theory, he would input those figures now, and we would be gone before the opening shift arrived at 6:45.

  I watched him walk across the large, rolling parking lot. The Food Giant was built, like much of Blackwater, on the uneven landscape of Pennsylvania coal country. If a shopping cart got away from you in this lot, it could roll for fifty yards, building up to a speed of twenty miles per hour before it crashed into a parked vehicle. That could do some serious damage, as any cart retriever would tell you.

  Dad disabled the alarm, unlocked the automatic doors, and slipped inside. I opened my PSAT prep book, hoping to get in a few minutes of study time.

  But that was not to be.

  First, I looked up and saw Bobby’s mother drop him off, fifteen minutes early, as usual. He was wearing his green Food Giant slicker in case of rain. (Bobby was always prepared. The Boy Scouts just said it; Bobby lived it.) After listening impatiently to some final words from his mother, he pushed away from the Explorer and started walking back toward Sunbury Street and that abandoned cart. Mrs. Smalls drove on to her job at the Good Samaritan Hospital.

  Then, just as I had returned to my book, a louder engine sound disturbed me.

  A black tow truck, driving too fast, bounced across the parking lot and took a hard left at the ATM. Its high-mounted headlights flashed right into my eyes. Then the driver killed the lights and backed up to the front of the store.

  A man in a hooded sweatshirt and a
black ski mask jumped out on the passenger side. He reached into the back of the truck and rolled out a metal hook so large that I could see it clearly from two hundred feet away. He wedged the hook into a slot in the ATM and gave the driver a hand signal. The truck lurched forward, creating a god-awful sound.

  I was now sitting bolt upright and staring at them. They were trying to rip the ATM out of the wall and make off with it—steal the whole thing and crack it open later for the cash inside.

  Suddenly, to my right, I saw a figure approaching. It was Bobby Smalls. He came running back clumsily in his green rain slicker, without the cart. He started waving his arms and shouting at the robbers.

  I thought, Oh no, Bobby. Not now! Keep away from them! I slid over into the driver’s seat and grabbed the steering wheel, trying to think what to do. I started pounding on the horn, making as big a racket as I could.

  The driver, dressed in the same type of dark disguise, stepped out of the truck. He was holding a strange object. It took me a few seconds to realize what it was—a compound bow. He then produced a feathered arrow, nocked it, and aimed it right at Bobby’s short, advancing body.

  The beeping horn got Dad’s attention. He appeared behind the glass in the entranceway, looking bewildered. He pulled the door open and stepped outside, holding out one hand toward Bobby like a traffic cop trying to get him to halt.

  The bowman changed his aim from Bobby to Dad and then back again. Was he going to shoot one of them? Or shoot one, reload, and get the other? Or was he just trying to scare them?

  I couldn’t take the chance. I cranked the car key and hit the gas pedal. The old van roared like an angry lion. I yanked at the gearshift, still revving the engine, and dropped it into drive. The van took off with a squeal of spinning tires and rocketed across the parking lot.

  The bow-and-arrow guy turned toward me and froze like a deer caught in the headlights. Then he aimed the bow right at me. I thought, Can an arrow pierce the windshield? He must have asked himself that same question and decided it could not. He lowered his weapon, tossed it into the cab, and climbed back into the driver’s seat.

  I continued to accelerate toward the truck, closing the gap quickly, like I was going to ram it. (Honestly, I had no idea what I was going to do.) By now, the other man had unhooked the cable and had scrambled inside the cab, too.

  The truck lurched forward and drove right at me, like in a deadly game of chicken. I hit the brakes and steered to the right, throwing the van into a wild skid, stopping just feet away from the frozen-in-place figure of Bobby Smalls.

  The tow truck continued across the parking lot and shot across Route 16, accelerating away into the darkness.

  I turned off the van’s engine, threw open the door, and hopped out.

  Suddenly everything was quiet.

  Dad came running from his spot by the door. He had a frantic look in his eyes. He started waving his hands back and forth to get Bobby’s attention. “Bobby! Bobby, are you okay?”

  Bobby didn’t answer. He was fumbling around under the green plastic slicker. He pulled out a cell phone and held it up. “I got to call my mom.”

  Dad nodded. His face was perspiring. “Yes. Yes.” He turned to me. “And you, Tom? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “That was smart thinking—honking the horn like that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But driving right at them? Where they could shoot you? Not so smart.”

  “I thought they were going to shoot Bobby. And you.”

  Dad looked at me curiously, like the second part of that had never occurred to him. “Me?” He shook all over, like he’d had a sudden chill. “Well, thanks, then.”

  Bobby was now angry at his phone. His stubby fingers had punched in the wrong number. He was about to dash it to the ground when Dad stepped forward and calmly took it away. “I’ll call your mother, Bobby.”

  Dad quickly pressed some phone keys. Bobby seemed confused. “You know her number?”

  “Sure. I call her all the time.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “To tell her what a good job you’re doing.”

  Bobby’s eyes widened upon hearing the praise. He loved praise. He thrived on it.

  Dad spoke into the phone. “Hello, Mrs. Smalls? It’s Gene Coleman at the Food Giant. Yes. Yes, Bobby’s okay. But we’ve had an … an incident here, an attempted robbery. Bobby helped to chase the robbers away.”

  Dad listened for a moment. It seemed like he was getting an earful. “Sure. Sure, I understand. We’ll probably be outside by the front door.” He hung up and told Bobby, “Okay. Your mother’s on her way.”

  “What for?”

  “To check to see that you’re all right.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “I know. She just wants to make sure. Can I use your phone to call the police?”

  “Yeah. Go ahead.”

  Dad called 911 and spoke to an operator. I craned my head forward to make eye contact with Bobby. I asked him, “What were you thinking there, dude? You could have gotten killed.”

  Bobby answered loudly, impatiently, as if the answer was obvious. “They’re thieves!”

  “Yes, they’re thieves. I’ll bet they’re murderers, too. I’ll bet they’d have murdered you if you’d gone a step closer.”

  “I’m not afraid of stupid thieves!”

  “He had a bow and arrow, Bobby. That’s a deadly weapon. You should be afraid of that. All you had was your cell phone.”

  “If they’re so brave, why are they wearing ski masks and covering up with hoods? They’re just thieves, that’s all. Stupid thieves!”

  Five minutes later, the police and Mrs. Smalls arrived, at the same moment, from opposite directions.

  Two police officers got out of the car and split up. One interviewed Dad, Bobby, and me. The other examined the ATM and walked around the lot, looking for evidence.

  I told the police officer what I knew, trying to sound no-nonsense and coplike: “It was a black tow truck. It didn’t say anything on the side. Two men were in it. They had ski masks on. They had a homemade bow. They had at least one arrow. They took off when I drove at them. They went out the same way they came in.”

  Bobby gave a much more spirited account of what had happened, and of how stupid the two thieves were.

  Mrs. Smalls took Bobby’s pulse, temperature, and blood pressure right there in the parking lot, much to his annoyance. She seemed satisfied with the results, but she did explain to my dad, “Bobby’s system is delicate, Mr. Coleman. It’s all part of Down’s syndrome. He may appear to be fine, but that can be deceiving. He can’t take too much stress. Down’s patients are very susceptible to heart attacks and strokes.”

  My dad nodded solemnly. “Yes, ma’am. You do what you have to do with Bobby. Take him home for a rest if he needs it.”

  Bobby threw up his hands in frustration, so his mother quickly added, “No. That won’t be necessary. But no more excitement today, Bobby. Okay? You take it slow today.”

  Bobby grumbled, “Yeah, I’ll take it slow.” He pointed to the store. “I’ll be like Reg the Veg today. I’ll take it slow. Real slow.”

  The sun was now rising behind the store. By seven, the back parking spaces started to fill in with employees from the early shift. Gert, the head baker, marched straight to the front door, with barely a sideways glance at us or the cops. So did Walter from customer service. Mitchell, the head of the meat department, veered over our way and slowed down to listen, but he never really stopped.

  Uno did, though. He’s the assistant manager, and in charge of opening up. He looked at my dad and held his hands out wide, as if to say, What gives?

  Reg the Veg stopped, too. He’s the produce manager. He pointed at the police car and whispered hoarsely, “WTF, man?”

  I replied, “Robbery attempt. On the ATM.”

  Reg started hollering, at no one in particular, “WTF, man!
WTF!”

  Uno, whose name is really John Rollnick, was a little more focused. “Did anybody get hurt, Tom?”

  “No.” I added, “But Bobby could have. My dad, too. The robbers were ten yards away from them, and they had a compound bow.”

  Uno shook his head. “Wow. A compound bow? I know guys who hunt with those. Do you think they were guys from around here?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I stood around talking to people for a while longer, telling them what I knew about the incident. Eventually, I heard the sound of a car creeping up behind me.

  I turned and saw a green Taurus. My mom was at the wheel, and my sister, Lilly, was sitting next to her.

  Plan B was obviously in effect. Dad must have called home.

  I walked back to the Dodge van. It was straddling two spaces, like it had been left there in mid-skid. I pointed to the far side of the parking lot, calling to Mom, “Pick me up out by the road.” I climbed in, started the van, and drove it carefully to its original space.

  Uno, Reg, and Bobby went inside to do their opening checklist jobs. Dad went in to call the corporate office. Mom got out of her car and hurried into the store behind him, and she didn’t come back out for a long time. (She was freaking out in there, I’m sure.)

  I spent the time thinking about this: The day could have begun horribly, with two murders. Or even three if they had shot me through the windshield, or rammed me in that game of chicken. The Food Giant could have a huge gash in its front wall, where the ATM had been ripped out, and a lot of money stolen.

  But none of that had happened.

  I took a moment to give myself credit. I had driven the thieves away. It could have been a horrible day, or a much-worse-than-it-turned-out-to-be day. A day that destroyed lives.

  Instead, from here on out, it would be a normal day.

  Mom finally emerged, climbed into the Taurus, and drove up to get me. As I slid into the backseat, she caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “Your father said you did a brave thing, Tom.”