The Eleventh Plague

by Jeff Hirsch

  “What have I told you?” Marcus yelled as he pulled her away. “What have I told you about fighting?”

  The girl didn’t argue with him, and instead took the time to kick one of the remaining boys firmly in the calf.

  The group of adults broke up as Marcus came charging through with her in tow. Some of them went to pull their wounded sons off the ground and others gathered in a tight knot around Caleb Henry, sternly watching the proceedings and whispering among themselves.

  As Marcus and the girl came closer, I got a better look at her. She had broad shoulders for a girl, inky black hair, and dark, almond-shaped eyes.

  Chinese, I thought, gripping the stock of Grandpa’s rifle. They were all supposed to be west of the Rockies. What is she doing here? With them?

  “You could have walked away,” Marcus said. “And let them call me a murderer and a spy? Let them call me a Chink?”

  “They’re just words.”

  “They’re just words to you!” she screamed, yanking her arm out of Marcus’s grasp and stalking away. “I didn’t start any damn war!” I tensed up as she came toward me.

  “Jenny!” Marcus called. “We’ll say something. I’ll talk to their parents!”

  “Forget it. Just forget it!” Jenny stomped toward the wagon, her face screwed up in rage.

  “Hey, Jenny, how’s it goin’?”

  “Shut up, Derrick!” she said, then whipped her head my way. “And what the hell are you looking at?!” she snapped as she shot past me.

  Jenny tore across the park and into the Greens’ house and returned several moments later with a big bag slung over her shoulder.

  “Jenny!” Marcus barked. “Don’t you just walk away! Jennifer Marie Green!”

  She whirled around to face him. “It’s Tan! My name is Jenny Tan!”

  Jenny ran up the road, disappearing into the darkness. It was quiet then, like the aftermath of a storm. Most of the other parents had drifted off, injured sons in tow, leaving Caleb Henry and his grim circle.

  “Beset on all sides,” Caleb intoned, looking from the Greens to me. His blue eyes reflected the twisting fire. “Even from within.”

  Marcus was about to say something back, but Violet appeared at his shoulder and he swallowed whatever it was. Caleb grinned wolfishly, satisfied, and drifted out of the group, his followers trailing behind him like smoke.

  Marcus stood in the middle of the road, his shoulders slumped, his hand clasped on the back of his neck. Violet rested her hand on his arm. He looked up wearily and nodded.

  Jackson was sitting against the wagon. His knees were drawn up to his chest, head back, staring blankly up at the stars. I would have thought he was praying, except for how his hands were curled into bone-white fists. He saw me and forced a smile.

  “Welcome to Settler’s Landing.”

  Soon the park emptied and I followed the Greens inside.

  “Jackets on the rack, everyone,” Violet announced as we entered. Jackson and Marcus dutifully obeyed, stripping off their coats and hanging them just inside the door.

  “If I don’t keep at them, they’re pigs,” she said. Once Violet got me settled in the room with Dad, she disappeared into the kitchen with Marcus.

  I stood by Dad’s bed, pulling my thin blanket out of my backpack.

  “Sorry for all that tonight,” Jackson said from the doorway behind me. “You can pretty much bet that if Jenny sees calm water, she’ll throw in the biggest rock she can.”

  “She’s your … sister?” I asked, still amazed that a Chinese girl lived with them.

  “Adopted, yeah. I was little, so I don’t really remember, but Mom said we went through this town the day after some big fight and there she was, wrapped in this old Chinese army jacket she always wears. She was all cut up and bloody. Mom figured whoever her parents were must have left her, thinking she was a goner, or maybe they got killed themselves. Anyway, Mom fixed her up and took her along with us.”

  “So how does she know her real name is Tan?”

  Jackson laughed. “She doesn’t,” he said. “That’s the thing — she just made it up. Guess that’s how much she didn’t want to be one of us. Anyway, she’ll go sleep it off in this old barn she goes to, out north of town. She’ll be well rested and ready to embarrass us again soon enough.”

  I rolled my sweatshirt up into a pillow and laid it out on the blanket. Jackson stood behind me a little while longer, then stepped back into the hallway.

  “Well … anyway, good night,” he said.

  Soon I heard the creaking of stairs and the soft shutting of a door. I blew out the candles scattered around the room and the house settled into darkness.

  Even in the dark, Dad’s skin was powdery and pale against his beard. His cheeks were sunken and there were hollows around his eyes. He looked like a stranger. An aching homesickness shot through me. There was so much that was new: these people, this place. I wished we could be back on the trail, just the two of us.

  I closed my eyes, praying I’d drift off immediately, but of course I didn’t. In fifteen years I had spent the night in tents and caves and abandoned buildings but never once in a house. I couldn’t breathe. I wrestled the window over Dad’s bed open, letting in the rhythmic chirp of crickets and the blow of the wind rustling through the trees.

  Across the park, the other houses loomed in the moonlight, their unlit windows like blank, staring eyes. Looking at it all made me feel the whole Earth tilting underneath me. Every other time in my life when I felt like this, I would go to Dad and it seemed, with just a wave of his hand, he could make things right again.

  Before I went to sleep, I leaned over his chest, straining to hear the soft pat of a heartbeat, but what was there was too soft and too far away to grasp.

  I was on my own.

  ELEVEN

  I woke with a start before dawn, disoriented. But soon the memories of the day before fell into place and everything began to clear. The house was quiet. Dad hadn’t moved.

  I pulled my blanket aside and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, wondering what I was supposed to do next. No salvage to secure, no trail to start down. I felt like some great wheel was spinning inside me, but it had nowhere to go.

  I slipped into my jeans and moved through the downstairs rooms, exploring. I found a sharpened stub of a pencil and an old nickel lying in a dusty corner and pocketed them. Other than that, there wasn’t much I hadn’t seen the night before. A few pieces of furniture. The pictures. The big wooden cabinet.

  I froze, remembering the glass and shining metal, and how Violet had shut the drawer so quickly, like she didn’t want me to see inside. I closed my eyes and listened to the house. Nothing. I slipped over to the cabinet and opened the top drawer. Inside there were gleaming rows of silver instruments: razors and scissors, picks and tweezers. I lifted out a large saw with brutal teeth. I set it down and moved to the next drawer.

  There, lying on strips of green felt, were the rows of frosted glass bottles. They all had white labels, with words like Morphine and Penicillin written on them in precise black letters. Marcus said Violet had been an army doctor. I guessed maybe she had done a bit of salvaging too before the military broke up. Whatever the case, it was a gold mine. For a fraction of what was in that cabinet, we could get a new wagon and mule, maybe even a horse, and enough supplies to get us trading again.

  A spring squeaked upstairs, followed by the sound of feet hitting the floor. I scrambled to make sure everything was in its place and then shut the drawers. When the Greens came downstairs, I was sitting innocently at Dad’s side.

  “How we doing this morning, Aloysius?” Marcus asked. He was standing in the doorway that led back to the kitchen, munching on a hard-boiled egg. He had a bowl of them in his hands.

  “Who’s Aloysius?”

  “You are,” Marcus said. “Well, at least until you tell us your real name.” Marcus held the bowl out to me. “Egg?”

  I hesitated for a second, but then the hunger took over.
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  “It’s Stephen,” I said as I plucked an egg from the bowl.

  “You think about what you’d like to do today, Stephen?”

  I glanced out the window. It was a bright fall morning, crisp. A full moon still hung in the sky, fading as the sun rose. Every part of me yearned to be out of the stifling closeness of the house.

  “I should just stay here,” I said. “With my dad.”

  “You sure?” Marcus asked. He gave me a moment, then turned back toward the kitchen. “Okay. Suit yourself.” His boots echoed down the short hallway.

  “Wait,” I called before he could disappear. “Maybe …” My mind spun in place. Wouldn’t Grandpa have given me a pounding if he knew I was in a place like this and didn’t take the time to do a little recon? I mean, who knew what else I’d find? “For all you’ve done for us … I can’t pay you, but maybe I could work.”

  “I told you, there’s no reason to —”

  I turned my eyes from the window and set them on Marcus, unmoving. It was a look that, when Grandpa used it, said there would be no compromise, no discussion. To my surprise, it actually worked.

  “Well, there’s a little of the fall harvest left,” Marcus conceded. “It’s not much but —”

  “It’s fine,” I said. A buzz of excitement lit through me. Just the idea of being out in the open air was a weight lifted off my shoulders.

  “Vi!” Marcus called into the kitchen. “Gonna take Stephen out with me to the harvest.”

  “Who’s Stephen?”

  “Aloysius.”

  “Oh! He should rest!” she yelled back.

  “Can’t! Says he has to be our indentured servant.”

  “Okay, well, have him clean the gutters while you’re out.”

  Marcus laughed. “Come on. I promise you, though, you’ll regret this.”

  I pulled on my boots and coat and tucked a piece of jerky into my pocket for later. I started to follow Marcus but stopped at the foot of Dad’s bed. Violet had removed the feeding tube from the night before, so he almost looked like he was just sleeping, his hands resting atop the clean white sheet. Could I really leave him here with these strangers? Then I remembered how Violet had cared for him, even defying Caleb to do it. I leaned down by Dad’s ear quickly, so Marcus wouldn’t see. “I’ll be back,” I whispered.

  Marcus grabbed his coat off the rack by the door and then I followed him outside.

  The second I stepped out the door I felt like I could breathe again. As we made our way deeper into the neighborhood, kids of all ages blew past us carrying salvaged backpacks and carpetbags. Groups of girls would meet up on the road and separate into age groups, the younger ones squealing and hugging, the older ones trying their best to seem unimpressed. The boys pushed one another, braying laughter loud as donkeys. I flinched as they thundered by and disappeared down a hill that dipped into the trees a few houses from Marcus’s.

  “Heading to school,” Marcus said. “Welcome to join them, you know.”

  I shook my head at the thought of being shut up inside some room with the screeching horde. I could only imagine what Grandpa would say about running off to school when there was work to be done.

  I cracked the egg Marcus had given me and ate it as I scanned the roadside and the yards along the way, looking for treasures like the ones in the Greens’ house, but found little. The place was amazingly neat; only a few scattered toys lay about here and there, abandoned as kids raced to school. The houses, though … what was in all of these houses?

  “Listen,” Marcus said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Sorry about Will and all. What are ya gonna do? Last month he accused Winona Lee of being a Fort Leonard spy. She’s eighty-three.”

  “What is Fort Leonard anyway?” I asked. “Another town?”

  “Barely. It’s a little settlement that popped up to the north. The map says it’s near a place called Fort Leonard. People have a bee in their bonnet since somebody saw a scout poking around east of here the other day. That’s who we were out looking for when we spotted you and your dad.”

  I nodded, but didn’t really get it. They brought me and Dad in, two complete strangers, when they were supposed to be out looking for a spy?

  The houses thinned out and then the land opened up into five large fields that stretched out about as far as I could see. Most were barren at this point, but the closest one was still full of rows of thick green sprouts. A dozen or so adults circulated around them.

  “Well, here we are,” Marcus announced. “The land of plenty! Whole thing used to be the town golf course. Took us almost the whole first year to clear the ground. ‘Bout killed us all, but it was worth it. We bring in a decent amount of wheat and corn and beans now. People mostly raise vegetables in their backyard gardens. Hey, Sam!”

  Sam waved from where he was kneeling down in the rows of plants.

  “We owe it all to Sam, actually. His people were farmers way back. He told us what was what.”

  Sam tipped his hat at the compliment. Marcus held out a handful of thin plastic bags to me. They said SAFEWAY in big red letters.

  “Okay,” he said. “You asked for it.”

  I took the bags and we picked two rows alongside Sam’s. We were harvesting carrots and onions. I stripped off my coat and sweatshirt and got down on my knees. At first I worked just enough to cover my inspection of the area around me. There wasn’t much to see though. A few farming implements, hoes and shovels mostly, sat nearby. I made a mental note of them.

  I ranged out toward a fence that ran along the length of the fields. The branches of the brown-leaved trees squeezed through its narrow openings or surged over top like an advancing army. The fence was warped in places, bent inward from years of trying to hold the forest back. Farther east, the fence disappeared — torn down, I guessed, when they’d cleared the land.

  “It used to be a gated community.”

  Sam was kneeling in the rows behind me, pushing his hands through the carrot leaves, picking and choosing. Marcus joined us from a few rows down.

  “What’s that?”

  “Before the Collapse,” Sam continued, “rich people like Marcus here’s family liked to build these self-contained neighborhoods, surround them with fences and security and whatnot. You know, keep out the riffraff. Anyway, this whole place was built right before everything went bad. After that, the people living here closed themselves up. Cut access to the roads, let some of the forest grow back in. With so much going on, they were just forgotten.”

  I stopped my digging and sat back on my heels. “What happened to them?” I asked.

  “P Eleven,” Marcus said. “Sickness took all but the Henrys. You know? Your buddy Will? His family. They have this big house on the north side. They were here when all of us arrived. Had a hand in building the place, I think.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said with a chuckle. “And they still think it’s theirs.”

  The sun was out now in full. A flock of birds cut across the sky and landed on the field, pecking briefly at the earth before swarming away again. I looked around at the ten or fifteen people moving through the rows, pulling in a harvest like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  It was sad in a way, standing there in the fields, watching them. They’d been lucky, incredibly lucky, but sooner or later I knew their luck would run out, just like it had for Dad and me. Just like it had for everybody. All it would take was one little mistake and they would be found and wiped out.

  How could they not know how useless it all was?

  “Lunch,” Marcus announced a couple hours later, stretching his back. “You ready, Stephen? I bet Vi has something good for us.”

  “Maybe I’ll keep going,” I said, thinking of the house’s awful stillness. “Is that okay?”

  “You should come and eat.”

  “I’m fine, really. It’s just … it’s good to be doing something. You know?”

  Marcus looked over at Sam, who just shrugged. “Kid wants to work.” />
  “All right,” Marcus said. “But not too much longer.”

  I handed Marcus my bags of carrots and he and Sam followed the others back toward the house. Once they were gone, I clapped the dirt off my hands, cut through the fields, and wound through the neighborhood’s unfamiliar streets.

  I ended up at the spur of a road leading down a hill, the same one the kids had streamed down earlier on their way to school. I looked over my shoulder: No one was around. I pulled the scrap of jerky from my pocket and chewed on it as I followed the road. Down at the bottom of the hill, there was a black parking lot, cut up into little slips with fading yellow paint. A low building, surrounded by a neatly trimmed yard that stretched behind it, was backed by a hill dotted with one large sycamore. Just behind a sidewalk that ringed the building there was an old sign that said in large black letters: SETTLER’S LANDING HIGH SCHOOL.

  I kept close to the school’s beige walls as I passed. Like all the buildings in the neighborhood, it was neat and well maintained, the brick foundation without a crack. The grass around it was short and free of weeds, and I found discarded kids’ things here and there on the ground. A jump rope. A broken colored pencil. I took what I could and kept going.

  I walked around the school, looking in the windows as I went. Inside there were empty classrooms filled with abandoned desks and chairs. I made it around to the back of the school, found a lone window, and peeked inside.

  Desks and chairs sat in six neat rows far below. There was a kid at each desk, pencil in hand, leaning over a stack of papers and writing intently. The rows were broken up by age, the youngest in the front, oldest in the back. Jackson and his friends sat together toward the rear. Will Henry sat on the opposite side of the room behind them, dozing, surrounded by twins, two pale, greasy boys who reminded me of slugs, and a giant redheaded boy with a grove of acne covering his face.

  All the rows faced a black chalkboard and a long wooden desk to my right. Sitting at the desk was a tall, thin man with steel-rimmed glasses, wearing a black suit that was a bit too tight and made him look like a scarecrow. He scanned the room, watching the quietly writing students.