The Eleventh Plague

by Jeff Hirsch

  I left the pen after the last horse had cleared it and followed along behind. I didn’t see Jenny anywhere — the cloud of mud and smoke was too thick and the roar of the animals was deafening. I was swept away with it, running, stumbling, barely able to see the ground beneath my feet, my mouth and nose clogging with dust. I thought I heard someone calling my name, thought I saw someone up ahead, but then it would all disappear in the gray churn and all I could do was run and hope I didn’t fall.

  It was worse when we moved out of the field and into the woods. There, the rumble and blare of the stampede were enclosed in the trees and focused, like an avalanche finding its course. The animal surge tore apart everything in its path: brush and leaves, exposed roots and saplings. All of it was shredded and sucked into the deluge, leaving a barren strip of land in its wake.

  The herd spread out as it poured into the field. When the firing and screams began, I knew they had found their mark. Out in the open now, I could see the animals breaking around the body of the jeep. Most of the soldiers had heard them coming and fled, but as I ran I passed the few who hadn’t, lying beaten and bruised on the ground, the conscious ones gasping for air as though they’d nearly been drowned.

  I didn’t know if Marcus and his people were taking the opportunity to attack or not — there was too much confusion to be sure — but up ahead I did see the one thing that mattered.

  Somehow the man with the scar had managed to hold his place on the machine gun at the back of the jeep. He was no fool either. He knew what was happening and wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the stampede around him. He was aiming squarely ahead, fully prepared for Marcus and his people to attack.

  I ran toward him as he leaned into the gun and a tongue of orange flame roared out of it. Taking three quick strides, I leapt up to the lip of the jeep’s bed. My foot hit the edge of it and I pitched forward, piling into him. He jerked around and, not missing a beat, dropped his fist like a hammer. The breath shot out of me. I gasped but somehow managed to hold on to him. He struggled, squirming and punching, until his feet hit a pile of shell casings that littered the floor of the jeep and he went down. I fell on top of him, my legs landing on either side of his chest. He looked up at me and a sudden burst of recognition shot through him.

  “You,” he growled.

  Before he could say anything more, I braced my forearm on his throat and pressed down with all my weight.

  I stared down at his white face, craggy and pitted and hard as Grandpa’s. His teeth were bared, his eyes burning but empty. I saw him coming at us in the plane, drunken and full of hate. For so long I had blamed Dad for what had happened. But I knew right then, leaning over that monster, that it was this man’s fault, everything was. All Dad had been trying to do was be a better man than him.

  I grabbed my wrist and leaned in, pressing down onto his throat. His fists slammed into my sides but I barely felt them. I wasn’t going to miss my chance. He gasped and his eyes widened, but he was far from giving up. He struggled even harder, his balled-up fists beating at my ribs, then grabbing at my shoulders. His hands went white, trying to tear me off. His left hand made it to my throat, his fingers clamping down as his right braced against my chest.

  I had to let go of him to pull his hand from around my neck. As I thrashed, his other hand closed around my throat as well. He pushed me over onto my side, then rolled on top of me, both hands on my throat.

  “Stupid kid,” he said as he squeezed. “You may have helped that woman and her brat, but looking for you and your dad led us right here where we made some nice new friends. I should thank you.”

  I threw my fists into him, but they bounced uselessly off his thick shoulders. I gasped for air as he put me down on my back and leaned over me, squeezing his big hands tighter and tighter.

  Gunfire crackled around me as the world tripped into darkness, collapsing until there was just his face, twisted into a snarl or a smile — I couldn’t tell which — hanging over me like an awful moon.

  The shouting and gunshots faded, receding farther and farther away. As darkness seeped in, I saw Mom and Dad. He had his arm around her, drawing her in close to his side. They were standing in a sun-drenched field against a blue sky, smiling, skin bronze and shining. Mom was in her red and gold dress, her hair blowing in the breeze.

  Mom’s hand grazed my cheek, then took my shoulders and brought me in between her and Dad so I could feel the warmth of their bodies and the steady rhythm of their breath, in and out, in and out, all around me.

  I looked up and saw the flash of her smile like a winking star.

  Then there was a crack, like thunder, and everything went black.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I was being dragged across the ground by my wrists, my arms thrown over my head, aching badly. Shackles. I’m in shackles. Rocks and shell casings scraped my back, and when I tried to breathe, the air was thick with smoke and my throat was wrecked. My head pounded.

  I was alive. How? I opened my eyes, but they stung from the smoke. All I could see were hazy blooms of light in the sky. Orange and yellow and then a smear of bloody red. I wrenched my head back, hoping to see who had me, but I couldn’t see any farther than my own wrists and the pair of hands that were clamped around them. Not shackles. Hands. Pulling me. But to where? I writhed, trying to free myself, but I was too weak.

  “Who are you?” I croaked. My throat was ragged, dry, and swollen like it was full of thorns. “Where are you taking me? Where’s Jenny?”

  A canopy of trees closed over us and whoever was pulling me dropped my hands and stalked a few feet away. I tried to sit up, but my back screamed in pain, so I lay there catching my breath, trying to ready myself for whatever was next. The fighting was a distant series of thumps and cries somewhere out on the field.

  A shadow fell over me and I cringed, attempting to get my hands over my face to protect myself. But all that came was a cool rush of water sweeping down over my forehead and across my eyes, wiping away the grime and the burning. I opened my mouth to let the water rush down my throat. Once I drank all I could, I opened my eyes again.

  Sitting behind me, a canteen in his hand, was Jackson. He wasn’t looking at me. His arm was wrapped in a bandage that was soaked through with blood. There was a clatter of gunfire way out in the field and then the yellow flash of an explosion that lit up his dirty face.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  Jackson nodded.

  “Where’s Jenny?”

  “With Dad and the others. They’re chasing the last of them out now.”

  I urged myself up to my elbows painfully. A low fog hung over everything, and a column of smoke billowed into the sky from the corner of the school’s roof that was visible.

  What had once been a baseball field was pitted and torn. A few animals stood here and there, lost. Some lay dead on the ground. The fighting had moved east into the woods. The jeep sat in the middle of the field.

  “What happened to …”

  And then I saw him. Just behind the jeep lay the man with the scar. He was facedown in the mud, his arms thrown over his head. The snow around him was stained a deep red.

  I turned to Jackson. His rifle lay on the ground next to him. He stared across the field at the man, looking hundreds of miles away.

  Jackson shuddered, then dropped his head into his hands, his chest heaving as he sobbed.

  I dragged myself closer and put my hand on his shoulder. I wanted to say thank you. I wanted to say I was sorry. I wanted to say a lot of things, but right then it seemed best to say nothing at all, so I sat there with him until his breathing slowed, thinking how the end of the world had made so many of us unrecognizable, even to ourselves.

  Soon, Jenny came running across the field and dropped down beside us. Her clothes were torn and dirty and there was a smear of blood on her forehead, but I couldn’t tell if it was hers or someone else’s.

  “Are you —”

  She lunged across me and grabbed Jackson into a hug. He
seemed surprised at first, but then his hands tightened around her back, grasping her to him.

  “Mom and Dad are all right,” Jenny told him breathlessly after they parted. “After the man with the dreadlocks ran, the rest started to fold. There are a few stragglers, but we’re pushing them back.”

  “How many of our people —”

  “Don’t worry about that now. We can —”

  “How many?” I insisted.

  Jenny looked at her brother, then at me. A tattoo of rifle shots crackled through the air, followed by the boom of explosions like a waning thunderstorm.

  “Twenty,” she said. “Maybe more.”

  “Will?”

  Jenny turned to track a low rumble that rose in the east.

  “He’s dead.”

  It was like the deep toll of a bell, leaving us silent, kneeling together under that stand of trees.

  We all turned as some kind of commotion broke out down the hill on the way to town. The few adults who remained were racing up the road past the school, shouting back and forth to one another.

  “What’s going on?”

  Jenny helped me and Jackson up, and together we trotted across the field and down the road. We reached town just behind the gathering group of people. They were all hurrying into the park, but the three of us froze where we were.

  Sam’s house was a wall of fire. Three houses down the road from it were smoking, their windows lit a livid orange from inside. Trees were burning like torches and spreading the fire from house to house. The slavers may have gone but we had a new problem now.

  Settler’s Landing was in flames.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Jenny pulled at my hand and we all raced into the crowd that was gathering in the park between Sam’s house and the Greens’. Others flooded in behind us, returning from the fight only to find their homes close to destruction.

  Tuttle stood at the center of the crowd shouting instructions I couldn’t make out over the roar of the fires and panicked voices. Buckets were passed out and people began filling them with snow and rushing off to the houses that hadn’t caught yet. Another group took axes and ran to the stands of trees between houses, hoping to fell them and create firebreaks.

  It seemed hopeless. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of burning. There was screaming as the crowd surged and pushed. Tuttle tried to keep people organized, but his voice was getting more and more drowned out.

  Someone forced a bucket into my hand and I was pushed on by the crowd, Jenny beside me.

  “We’re going to the school,” she shouted into my ear. To her right were Jackson and Derrick and some others.

  “They sent the little ones there,” Derrick said. “Thought they’d be safe there during the fight. We think some of them are still there now!”

  I remembered the plume of smoke I’d seen rising from the school roof and broke into a run. There were about twenty of us, some with axes and some with buckets. We tore down the hill and across the parking lot to the school.

  It was better off than many of the houses, but smoke was seeping out of the cracks of doorways and some of the windows were lit up with flames. Derrick led a group to a snowbank nearby where they began to fill their buckets.

  “Where are they?” I asked Derrick. “The kids?”

  “Toward the back, I think.”

  I dropped the bucket and once Jenny, Jackson, and I made it to the school’s front doors, I slammed my shoulder into them. The doors gave with a screech and a wave of heat. It was worse inside than it looked. Jenny motioned some of Derrick’s team into the doorway and they began tossing loads of snow onto the walls to try to keep the fire from growing. There was a hiss and gasps of steam as some of the flames were squelched.

  “Stay low,” Jenny called.

  The three of us covered our mouths and noses and ducked down, crawling along the floor where the air was clearer. We checked all of the small classrooms we passed, but each was empty except for overturned desks and chairs. The smoke was already massing in my throat and burning my eyes. We had to find them fast.

  The three of us finally reached the main classroom at the end of the hall and tumbled through the doors, coughing. The air inside was clearer, but still just as hot. I doubled over and sucked in a painful breath. At first the room seemed empty, but then I saw a leg poking out from behind Tuttle’s big desk. “There!”

  We found ten of the little ones cowering behind the desk, all of them stained with soot and looking terrified. Jenny dropped to her knees by their side.

  “It’s going to be okay, guys,” she said calmly. “Just come with us and we’ll get you out of here.”

  The kids shied away at first, like scared animals, but she was finally able to pull them to their feet and lead them back to the doors. I paused by the desk as she went. Jenny turned back.

  “Take them out of here,” I shouted.

  “What are you going to do?” Jenny asked.

  I turned toward the far wall of wooden shelves. Each level was stacked with row after row of books. Science. Government. The arts. Everything.

  “Are you crazy? We don’t have time, this place is coming down!”

  Over her shoulder I could just see Jackson leading the kids into the smoky hallway.

  “Then go! Help Jackson with the kids!”

  I knew Jenny would keep protesting, so I turned from her and ran for the bookshelf, weaving through the lines of desks and pulling books off as fast as I could, filling my arms with them. I reached for a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, but Jenny got it first.

  “One more stupid thing I have to do because of you,” she said with a sooty smile as she yanked down a score of books.

  Our arms were full when there was another moan from behind us. The far wall of the classroom was blackening and about to go. Soon the whole place would be on fire.

  “Think we’re out of time, pal. Let’s get out of here!”

  Just as we turned to the doors, a curtain of flame appeared, blocking our way. The wall alongside it had begun to smolder too. Smoke was now seeping into the room.

  We both stood there, our arms weighed down with books, looking for some way out. The walls around us groaned. Tinder deep inside them crackled and popped. We were trapped.

  “Well, Stephen? Any more bright ideas?”

  I looked all around the room. I had nothing. The only doors out were blocked and the fire was only growing stronger and hotter. The books felt like lead in my arms. How could I have been so stupid? We were going to die for these? As the smoke grew thicker all I could think of was the whole town wiped away, little more than a smudge of ash in the woods. All they had done, all they had built, would be lost, forgotten.

  “We have to just run for it,” Jenny said. “Drop the books and jump through the fire. It’s the only way.”

  It was insane. The fire had grown too big, feeding off the old wood. “Jenny, no. We can’t —”

  “Just do it!”

  Jenny dropped the load in her arms, but then someone screamed my name from behind us. I turned to see Jackson leaning through the open window high up on the back wall.

  “Come on,” he shouted. “This way!”

  I looked up at the window. It was narrow and set a good fifteen feet high. We’d never make it. I spun around the room, hunting for a solution, but all I saw were desks and chairs and … something snapped. I had it.

  “The desks!” I shouted to Jenny. “Come on.”

  Jenny started grabbing desks out of their neat rows and dragging them over to the window. There, we stacked desk upon desk until we made a ladder leading up to the window. Jackson knelt at the window’s edge and held out his hand. I pushed Jenny up first. When she reached the top she turned and held her hand out for me, but instead of starting the climb I reached back and gathered the stacks of books.

  “Come on!” Jenny urged.

  “Hey, remember how I promised Tuttle I’d bring about the new golden age?”

  “Stephen!”


  “I’m not moving until you take them!”

  Jenny grimaced but held out her hands as I dug into the piles and handed up as many as I could. She passed them off to Jackson, then dove through the window and reached down for my hand.

  “Okay, now you!”

  The desks were shakier than I’d thought. The thin metal legs quivered as I climbed. I could feel the heat of the fire singeing my back, growing by the second. I made it up one desk, then two, but as I reached for the third, there was another collapse behind me and I felt the bottom desk shift and falter.

  “Jump!”

  My legs shook. There was a crash as the desks tumbled beneath me and then I was falling, my arms pinwheeling as the hands of gravity pulled me backward, down into the smoke. There was a strange moment as Jenny’s face seemed to rush away from me and everything else slowed down. I felt weightless and weak and I knew there was nothing I could do. I would fall and the smoke would swallow me whole, but at least Jenny and Jackson and the kids would be safe. I closed my eyes, accepting it, but then I jerked to a stop.

  I opened my eyes and there was Jenny leaning halfway out of the window, her hand locked onto my wrist.

  “Gotcha,” she said, and then other hands appeared, latching on to me and dragging me up toward the window. As I got closer, Jackson took hold of my sleeve. I grabbed on to them, pushed against the wall with my feet, and climbed, the fire licking at my heels.

  When I made it to the window more hands reached out: Derrick’s, Martin’s, Carrie’s, and others’. I felt the cold, fresh air rush into my lungs and I bent over, coughing, then fell onto my side. Behind my friends were the ring of little ones and a stack of books mostly untouched by the fire.

  I had only a moment to rest before Jenny lifted me up and we all stumbled away from the building and out to the battlefield. Once we were far enough away, we stopped and turned back to the school.

  Flames had consumed most of the west wall and were spreading around to the front. Soon the roof groaned and fell in. When it did, the fire surged, lighting up the gray sky and filling it with columns of smoke. It seemed as though only minutes passed before there was nothing but piles of burning wood and scattered bricks.