The Eleventh Plague

FIFTEEN

I skipped school the next day and spent it searching for Jenny but had no luck finding her. I ended up standing in the field east of the school, watching Jackson and the rest gather for their daily baseball game, choosing sides, lining up, swinging their bats through the crisp air.

I had never played baseball, but with how much Dad talked about it I almost felt like I had. He pitched throughout high school and was a passionate Padres fan. Sometimes to keep us entertained on the road, he’d recount major games he had seen in painstaking detail. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and let myself drift closer to the game, finally finding a spot to sit in the grass.

No harm in watching, I thought. Just for a few minutes.

Derrick and Jackson’s team was lining up for the first at bat. Martin threw a battered plastic helmet to a broad-shouldered girl, and she took a few practice swings before making her way to the plate. She hunkered down, eyeing the tall pitcher sharply, and let the bat hover over her shoulder. She was ice-cold and didn’t move an inch on his first two pitches but unloaded completely on his third and sent the ball rocketing into the blue sky. She made it to second, then stopped, cheating out toward third.

“Carrie V.”

Jackson had strayed from the game and was standing just a few feet in front of me. I half expected him to tell me to beat it, given how I’d acted after school the previous day. But he just stood there and watched the game, his hands in the pockets of a worn pair of khaki pants. Soon he eased down next to me. I set my palms in the grass, ready to get up and walk away, but for some reason I didn’t. I just sat there, watching.

“She’s one of our best. The pitcher is her boyfriend, John Carter. She knows him inside and out. Almost always gets a hit off him.” Jackson turned to face me over his shoulder. “You can play, you know. If you want.”

“I gotta get back to my dad.”

A shrimpy kid with long hair made his way nervously to home plate with the encouragement of his teammates. “Stan,” Jackson said. “Not our best player. Hey, where were you today?”

“I was out,” I said, quickly. “Just … looking around.”

“So what did it say?” Jackson asked.

“What?”

“The note. The one Jenny made me give you that got you tearing out of school.”

“Oh. Nothing. She was” — I scrambled for a lie that might sound even slightly convincing — “messing with me.”

It sounded weak. Jackson gave me a little sideways look, then returned to watching the game. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s Jenny, all right. She can’t leave well enough alone.”

It was silent for a moment as Stan took a couple practice swings. I felt another twinge of guilt. Jackson didn’t have to come over and talk to me, not after how much of a jerk I had been.

“I was looking at your books,” I said. “The other day. It’s a really good collection.”

Jackson turned back. “Thanks. I do chores for people and they give me books in return. You like to read? You can borrow them anytime if you want.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’d be great.”

Jackson nodded and turned back as Stan took a couple practice swings, then lifted the bat over his shoulder. The ball came streaking toward him. For some reason Stan stepped closer to the base as he swung, bringing his right leg into the path of the oncoming ball. Jackson saw it just as I did.

“Oh, this is not going to be good.”

The ball slammed into Stan’s thigh and he went down cursing.

“Every other time,” Jackson said. “I swear, the kid gets hit by the ball more than he hits it. Aw, man, now we’re one man down. I better go. See ya, Steve.”

Jackson hopped up and ran to his team, stopping to check in on Stan, who was sitting on the sidelines. I stripped off my coat and lay in the grass, watching as Jackson and Derrick conferred. They seemed to be having some kind of argument. Derrick was waving his arms and refusing some request of Jackson’s, but Jackson kept at him until Derrick finally relented. He turned away and began waving to someone behind me to join the game. I looked back, but no one was there.

Oh no.

“Hey! Steve! Hey! Over here! Yoo-hoo!”

I tried to ignore him, but Derrick made it nearly impossible. Soon he was jumping up and down on his toes and calling in a high-pitched squeal. The whole team was watching now, and a rush of embarrassment hit me. I started to retreat back to the Greens’, but something made me stop and look around.

The grass, holding on despite the coming of fall, was thick and green. There was the slightest chill and the smell of wood smoke in the air. Where was I going? Back inside the tomb? To my dad, who, no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t help? It was true that soon all of this would be gone and we would rejoin the trail, but I was here now. This was my world. Would it really hurt to live in it, just for a day?

Before I knew it, the grass seemed to be moving under my feet. I trotted, head down, toward the game.

“It’s okay, everybody!” Derrick shouted as I reached the edge of the field, hanging back from the team. “Our savior is here! Steve will fill in for Stan.”

“Can he even play?” someone shouted from back in the lineup.

“Can he play?” Derrick repeated, dumbstruck. “He’s a heckuva lot better than any of us. His dad was an actual New York Yankee before the Collapse. Taught him everything he knew.”

The flash of embarrassment hit again as the team erupted into a chorus of oohs and aahs.

Derrick leaned in. “You, uh, do know how to play, right?” he whispered.

“In theory.”

“Well, you’re still one up on Stan,” Derrick said. “Anyway, you’re at bat!”

“Oh wait, maybe someone else should —”

But Derrick was already pushing the bat into my hand. He and the others were cheering me from behind the fence to home plate. I felt like I was being pushed onstage to star in a play I didn’t know any of the words to.

“Hit and run!” Derrick shouted. “Just hit and run!”

“Tear the cover off it, Steve!” Jackson yelled.

“Don’t suck,” Stan called from the bench.

My stomach quivered, but I found myself raising the bat to my shoulder, readying myself for a fresh disaster. I took a deep breath and got into a slight crouch, eyes on the pitcher. He nodded at the catcher behind me, then started his windup. Before I could move an inch, the ball slapped into the catcher’s glove.

“Well done,” he said, smirking as he tossed the ball to the pitcher. “I think you’re a natural.”

“It’s okay, Steve!” Jackson shouted. “That one wasn’t yours!”

The pitcher turned back, a big grin on his face. I raised the bat and crouched, scowling. He wound up and threw, but this time it was like everything slowed down. I could see the white ball tumbling toward me. The voices behind me elongated. I brought the bat around in a quick arc, and as it connected with the ball there was a sweet, sharp crack. The ball sailed out into the field, over the head of the pitcher, into the outfield.

Dopey and amazed, I watched as the ball lifted into the sky and over the trees whose top branches moved in the wind like hands waving good-bye. I turned back to my team, bat dangling from my hand, eager to share this incredible triumph, but they were all standing on the tips of their toes, looks of terrified anticipation on their faces.

“Don’t just stand there, you moron!” Carrie screamed from second, shattering the moment. “Run!”

Oh! Right! Now I run!

The bat clattered at my feet as I took off. I passed first base easily, then skidded in to second. The baseman there was pivoting toward the outfield and raising his glove, his eyes squinting to track the ball headed his way. In a second he’d have me, so as I got closer I threw my shoulder out and it connected with his right arm. It knocked him off balance enough to make him miss the throw. The ball bounced off his glove and bobbled into the outfield. While he was scrambling for it, I was leaving him behind and making for third base in a cloud of dust.

Carrie waved her hands wildly to get me to stop, but it was like there was this engine in me that was running nearly out of control and there was no way I could stop it even if I wanted to. It felt too good: my feet ripping into the soft dirt, my lungs and legs pumping madly, the distant sound of cheering. Finally Carrie was forced to abandon her base and run for home. Following her, I rounded third, digging in and pushing myself faster. I was halfway there when I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye — an arm reeling back to throw a ball.

“Dive!” Jackson shouted.

I threw my arms out in front of me without thinking, as though I was diving into a huge, clear lake, and I sailed across the next few feet, weightless, stretching for home. When the ground leapt up to meet me, it was like jumping headfirst into concrete. The impact rang through me and I got a face full of dirt, grass, and bits of rock. When I could move again, I rolled painfully to my side and saw the catcher standing there with the ball in his hand.

He dropped his arm to tag me, but stopped when he saw my outstretched fingers, straining, but definitely, without a doubt, touching the flat gray rock that was home.

We played until the sun sank behind the trees and cast gold-streaked shadows across the field, then we gathered up our equipment and started the walk back to town. I trailed behind the main pack with Jackson, Derrick, and the other side’s pitcher, John Carter.

“You did good, Steve,” Derrick said. “I mean, you kind of tanked after that first run, but —”

I surprised myself by giving Derrick a playful shove, knocking him into Jackson. He was right — after that first run, I had struck out three times in a row. When it was time for us to play defense, I was stuck safely way out in right field.

“So you really never played before?” John asked.

“No. Never.”

“Not anything?”

I scooped up a pebble from the road and skipped it down the asphalt. “Dad found this old football once, out behind a Walmart. We’d play catch with that sometimes.”

Up ahead, Carrie drifted toward the four of us, falling in next to John and taking his hand. “You guys up for going to the quarry?”

John said sure, but Derrick hedged. “I don’t know. I really have to do my homework and then get right to bed.”

“Shut up, Derrick,” Carrie said. “What about you, Steve? It’s just this place out to the east, like a manmade pond. We go there after games sometimes.”

I looked over my shoulder, back to where Dad lay in a deep coma at the Greens’ house, but the tug I felt toward him seemed fainter than it had before. I knew he was safe since Violet was with him. And hadn’t she said he would have wanted me to go to school if I could? Well, maybe he would want this too. Me playing baseball. Me with people my own age. Having a life a little bit like he must have had back before the Collapse.

“Yo!” Carrie called out. “Everybody! Quarry!”

We continued up the hill and then moved out to the east of town, past the fields and into the trees as night began to settle around us. After a while the path opened up into a circular clearing, the ground at the center of it falling away in rocky steps, leading down to a pool of water that was dotted with the reflections of stars that were just beginning to appear.

Everyone scattered when we got there, breaking up into smaller groups of two or three or four and finding places around the pool. One kid, the third baseman from the other team, dipped his hand into the water and pulled out a net that was filled with mason jars. He unscrewed the top off one, took a long drink of whatever was inside, then passed it around the circle.

When it came to me I dipped my nose in and caught the smell of rotten fruit and a nose-singeing tang of alcohol. Home brew. Grandpa used to trade for it sometimes when we had some salvage to spare, and he would get blisteringly drunk on it after dinner. Mom would generally lead me into the tent for a reading lesson whenever he got going.

I took a small sip, then winced. “So, how did all of you end up here?” I asked.

“We were coming north from Georgia,” Martin said from his place behind me. “And we ran into, like, this entire ex-US army regiment. Dad decided we’d go through these caves he found to get around them. Took us five days. Five days with no food. My brother” — Martin’s voice hitched, then he continued — “he was really freaking out. Cried the whole time until we found our way out. We had no idea where we were, but a few weeks later, we found Derrick and his folks. And then Jackson and his. Now here we are.”

As soon as he stopped talking, Martin stared down into the dark water, his face cloudy and distant. I knew why, of course, could tell from the millisecond stumble after he said “my brother.” It was the same one I always made after saying “my mother.” Somehow between that story and now, his brother was lost. I nudged Martin with the edge of the jar and held it out to him.

“Thanks,” he said.

Others told their stories and as they did I looked around the group, noticing things I hadn’t seen before. A long jagged scar along the forearm of the blond kid who played right field. A deep smudgelike burn mark peeking out from under the sweater of the redheaded girl sitting on the other side of me. The more I looked, the more I saw them, those telltale marks of lives lived after the Collapse. How had I not noticed them before? Was it possible that they all had lives like mine at some point until they came here?

What would have happened, I wondered, if Dad had stood up to Grandpa when I was little and insisted we leave the trail? Could we have ended up here? Would we be living in houses and going to school and cookouts and baseball games?

Would Mom still be alive?

The redheaded girl tapped my arm with a second jar of home brew that had made its way around the circle. I shook my head and she passed it along down the line.

“I’m Wendy, by the way,” she said quietly, her small fingers grazing my arm. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m —”

“Cann-on-ball!”

There was a gigantic splash that soaked all of us. When I looked up, Derrick was shooting to the surface of the churning water, in his underwear, a dopey smile on his face. Two of the mason jars sat empty where he had been sitting. Jeers came from every corner of the quarry, but they were all mixed with laughter.

“Derrick!”

“Derrick, you jerk!”

“You got us all wet!”

Derrick laughed a deep stuttering laugh and floated lazily on his back.

Wendy shook her great head full of curls and chuckled. “Love, hate. Love, hate. That’s all it ever is with him.”

“Okay!” Carrie said, rising unsteadily from John’s lap. “I think that’s our cue, babe.”

John offered me his hand. “Hey, man, good job today.”

“Thanks. You too.” Carrie dragged John up and the two of them said their good-byes and headed down the path to town with their arms around each other’s waists. Soon, other couples emerged from the woods and drifted home.

“Well,” Jackson said, “I guess we should go pull him out.”

Martin and Jackson and I stripped off our shoes, rolled our pant legs up high, and went in after Derrick. Luckily by that time he was pretty tired, so it wasn’t too hard to catch him. The trick was getting his bulk out of there and to shore while he mumbled over and over how much he loved us.

“Really, honestly, totally, you dudes are awesome. Just awesome,” he said, struggling with his pants.

After we finally got Derrick up and dressed, but before we could get him moving down the path, he lurched forward and grabbed me up into a soggy bear hug, pushing us away from the others.

“This is what it’s like, Steve,” he whispered intently only inches from my ear. His breath was heavy with the sweet cherry smell of the home brew.

“What what’s like, Derrick?”

He pulled back slightly and for a moment didn’t seem drunk at all. His eyes were clear and focused.

“This is what it’s like to have friends,” he whispered.

I stood there in the silence as a grin grew across Derrick’s face and then he fell into Wendy’s and Martin’s arms. “Home, friends! Take me to my home! And you! Wendy! Off with your pants! You too, Marty!”

He giggled as Wendy and Martin led him down the path back to town. I stood there motionless, surrounded in the rhythmic chatter of the grasshoppers and cicadas and the gentle lapping of the quarry’s water. Everything seemed to hang in perfect balance, all of it strange and welcome at the same time.

This is what it’s like to have friends.

“You okay?”

Jackson was standing in the shadows, waiting.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

We left the quarry and made our way through the woods to Jackson’s house. Before we got there, though, we slowed without a word and stopped in the park across the street. Jackson sat on one of the swings and I climbed up onto the jungle gym next to him.

To our left, the road wound out of town and away like a ribbon. The pinpricks of candlelight in the windows around us gave the neighborhood the look of a constellation come to Earth.

“So how’d you guys end up here?” I asked. “You never said.”

Jackson twisted the toe of his sneaker into the dirt. For a second I thought he hadn’t heard me. “We were in, I don’t know, Kentucky, I think, with some other families in a little tent city. Mom and Dad were out doing some hunting, and Jenny and I were by this stream downhill from the camp playing Go Fish with some cards she had made. The sun had just gone down and it was all orange and gold.” Jackson’s fingers curled tight around the swing’s chain. “That’s when we heard them coming. There were maybe fifteen of them. Twenty. They looked just like us. Maybe a little better off. They came into camp, all smiles, asking if they could have some water from the stream. Nice as could be.

“The man who I guess was their leader was walking with Mr. Simms. Mr. Simms was a friend of my dad’s and was in charge of us when Mom and Dad were away. He was older than my folks and lost his whole family to P Eleven and kind of adopted all of us.

“Anyway, the new group’s leader, this big hulk of a guy, put his arm around Mr. Simms’s shoulder as they walked. After a few steps he pulled Mr. Simms close and said, ‘Knock, knock,’ which is the start to this old joke. When Mr. Simms said, ‘Who’s there?’ the man reached into his jacket, pulled out a gun, and pressed the barrel right into Mr. Simms’s temple.”

Jackson’s voice caught in his throat. His eyes were far away, remembering. “I saw him do it and I thought, ‘Oh, this is a joke. It’s a joke.’ But then the man pulled the trigger and there was this explosion and Mr. Simms … dropped.”

Jackson’s Adam’s apple rose and fell and his lips pressed into a tight line.

“Everyone froze. All of us. There wasn’t a sound, just Mr. Simms hitting the ground. Jenny and I stood there watching this fan of blood spread out around his head. Then someone screamed and then everyone was screaming and rushing to their tents for their guns or to escape, but it was too late. The man and his people were everywhere, shooting anyone they could, laughing like it was all this big game, like the rest of us weren’t even real.

“There were about twenty-five, maybe thirty, of us in all. Men and women. Some kids me and Jenny’s age. The leader and his group killed all but us and a couple others. Then they put their guns away, took whatever supplies we had, and strolled back out of town.”

A cold wind blew across the playground and made the trees around us moan. Jackson dug his hands into his jacket pockets.

“Whole thing didn’t take but five minutes. When Mom and Dad came back, we took our things and ran as fast as we could, but no matter how far away we got, I thought they were right around the corner, ready to pop out again, just … smiling and shooting.”

By now the dark of night was settling in. Everything around us — the trees, the houses, the curves of the land — was looming shapes, like animals prowling beneath dark water.

Jackson looked back at me, but I didn’t know what to say to him. If we were friends, like Derrick had said, what did friends do? What did they say?

“Guess somebody like you has never felt like that,” Jackson said quietly, turning away from me. “Afraid.”

Shadows of leaves played over Jackson’s drawn, pale face. I stared down at my lap. Something ached deep in my chest. The idea that I had never been afraid was ridiculous but I knew what Grandpa would have said. Never admit fear. Never admit weakness.

“I’m afraid all the time,” I said. “After my mom died, I couldn’t sleep. Not for months. I’d lie awake at night and think about Dad or Grandpa getting sick. One of them dying. Dad told me we’d be fine. He said nothing would ever change again, but then Grandpa died and he …”

I shut my mouth tight and closed my eyes. Saying all of that, thinking it, even, made the whole ugly mess real all over again. It was like this darkness that I could keep at bay most of the time, but if I got too close, if I touched it, it would seize up and have me.

“Hey.”

I opened my eyes with a start. Jackson had left the swing and was standing right beside me.

“You’re here now,” he said. “We both are, right? No matter what happens. Me and my folks, all of us, we won’t let anything happen to you.”

I looked away from him, along the houses and up the street. How could I tell him that it would only be a matter of time before all of this was gone and we were scattered to the wind? Did a friend say that?

“Probably time for dinner, isn’t it?” I said, slipping off the jungle gym.

Jackson lagged behind as I crossed the park and went up the stairs and into the house. The fireplace smelled smoky and warm. Timbers creaked above me. I stood by Dad’s bed, looking down at him. His chest rose and fell weakly as he breathed.

“We’ve been here five years now,” Jackson said from behind me in the hallway that led to the kitchen, half in and half out of the light. “I don’t know if it’ll be forever, but we’ve almost been wiped out by storms and droughts and bad crops and a hundred other things, and we’ve always made it. We just stuck together and never gave up.”

Later that night, when I closed my eyes and headed to sleep, it was as though I could feel all of them: Marcus and Violet and Dad and Jackson and, somewhere outside in places of their own, Derrick and Martin and Wendy and Carrie and Jenny too. I felt each of them like blooms of heat pulsing out in the night, separate but connected.

Instead of the tomblike stillness of the previous nights, the house felt warm around me, like all of us were settled underneath a thick blanket with the cold winds and the world safely outside.

Was Jackson right? Was it real? Could it last?

I didn’t know. But right then, lying there in that quiet and warmth, I hoped. For the first time, I hoped.