The Eleventh Plague

TWENTY

Minutes later I was running through the woods behind Jenny. There was no path I could see, so I had to struggle to keep an eye on her as she ran, slick as a deer, in and out of the pools of moonlight that littered the forest floor.

She knew the woods better than I did and made a game out of staying ahead of me so that I could follow but never quite catch up. It wasn’t until we both had to slow down to scale the Settler’s Landing fence that I got anywhere near her. She dropped down into a crouch just behind a thick stand of trees. When I came up, Jenny put her finger to her lips and motioned for me to get down. Both of us were breathing heavily, pushing out thick plumes of white steam.

“Where are we?” I whispered.

Jenny motioned forward with her chin. “Take a look.”

In the clearing ahead was a house totally unlike all the others in Settler’s Landing. It was enormous, more of a mansion than a house, with towering white walls and columns flanking the front door like marble generals. Two windows in the upper stories glowed with yellow light and filled the yard with a flickering glow.

“Casa de Henry,” Jenny said. “What are we doing here?”

Just then the lights in the upper windows went out. “Come on. We have to go around back.”

Jenny took off deeper into the woods, heading to the rear of the house. As we moved around it, its size became even more overwhelming. The walls stretched back another hundred feet or so.

Behind the house there was a collection of fenced enclosures that looked recently built, homemade from scrap pieces of wood, split logs, and scavenged chicken wire. One held chickens, another pigs, and a third sheep.

“The horses and about twenty cows, mean suckers, are in different enclosures on the other side of the trees, but this’ll do,” Jenny told me.

“Do for what?”

Jenny wasn’t listening. She had started to dig around in her bag. “Take these.” She dropped a handful of the fused cylinders into my hand.

“You want me to blow up the sheep?”

Jenny slapped me on the side of the head. “No! We’re not gonna hurt them.”

“But —”

“Look, the word explosive, when applied to these things, is a little grand. They’re more like firecrackers.”

“Jenny, I don’t know. If we get caught —”

“What? We already tossed ourselves out of town. Right? Look, I swear to you, they’ll never know it’s us. Besides, what we are about to do is incredibly obnoxious but more or less harmless.”

“What are we about to do?”

She smiled a razory smile. “We are going to make sure Will Henry has a really, really crappy night. Now go around to the sheep pen, open the gates, and toss them in. Oh! Matches.”

Jenny shoved a cardboard box of matches in my hand and darted out from behind the tree to a spot between the pig and chicken enclosures. I made my way to the sheep’s pen, one eye always on the house in case a light came on. I ducked down by the gate. Most of the sheep were in a knot at the center of their pen and didn’t even raise their heads as I approached. I slipped the rope loop that held the gate closed up over a post. There was a sharp squeak from the hinge as I opened it that made my heart freeze. One sheep raised its head with mild curiosity but then lowered it again.

I shuffled the bundle of firecrackers in my palm. It was crazy. Utterly crazy. I peeked over the fence. Jenny was poised at the pig pen, firecrackers in hand. I swallowed hard and turned back to the sheep standing placidly in the mud. I saw Will Henry pushing Jenny to the ground. I saw his gold hair and his vicious smile.

I lit the fuse as Jenny struck hers, then tossed my bundle about five feet behind the biggest knot of sheep. One turned back toward the sparking pile of firecrackers.

“Baaaaa.”

The explosions were so much bigger than I thought they’d be — a fast procession of booms, sizzles, and cracks, followed by great showers of sparks, red and green and yellow, shooting up into the sky and exploding again, creating umbrellas of fire that lit up the yard like a new sun.

“Cool!” Jenny exclaimed as she slid into the dirt next to me. “I had no idea they were going to do that.”

The animals completely lost their minds. I had never heard anything like it — the clucking, the oinking, the … whatever it is that sheep do was deafening. In seconds they were on the move, pouring out of the gates of their pens. Most of them headed right for the Henrys’ huge and beautiful home. Candles flared throughout the house and I could imagine what was going on inside: a confused jumble of Henrys shouting over the squeals of the animals, trying to get dressed, reaching for guns.

“Um, Jenny, I think we better get out of here.”

Just then the back door opened and Will came running out in his underwear, a shotgun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He was joined by a mix of relations, a group of much older brothers and a small girl with blond hair I guessed was his sister.

The animals made right for them, a tidal wave of flesh that curled around their legs, knocked them off balance, then scattered out in all directions. The smaller ones leapt onto the fine white porch and covered everything with a layer of mud and panicked excrement. A few even made it through the back door and into the house, eliciting a chorus of screams and smashing pots and pans. But the bulk of the animals tore right into the woods, crushing through the brush and disappearing. Caleb emerged from the house and shouted at the others to get after them. Will tried to comply but right then a particularly terrified sheep knocked him into the mud.

“Yes!” Jenny said. “Mission accomplished!”

“Hey! Who’s there?!”

The beam of a big flashlight was coming Jenny’s way. It would hit her any second.

I leapt up out of the brush. “Bow down to your new masters!” I yelled. “Fort Leonard forever!”

The flashlight jerked away and we took off into the woods, laughing just as a shotgun exploded behind us. We ran flat out, leaping over streams and dodging walls of thornbushes, pausing only long enough to fling ourselves up over the fence before racing on again. Even when the sounds of the stampeding livestock and the panicked Henrys were lost in the thicket behind us we kept running. Jenny was ahead of me when the barn appeared in front of us.

As we crossed the clearing, I gave a burst of speed and was right at her heels. I grabbed hold of her arm and tried to pull her back, but our momentum sent us both careening into the wall, landing hard enough to make the whole barn shudder. Jenny hit first and I piled into her, trapping her with my arms. She twisted around so her back was pressed up against the wall.

“I still won,” she panted.

Her cheeks were bright red from the cold and slashed with strands of black hair.

The next thing I knew, we were kissing. I don’t know if she started it or I did. My elbows collapsed, making a cage around her, pressing our bodies together so that when we fought for air our chests crashed together.

Her hands clasped around my back, pulling me in tight. My hand found her hip, then rose up until it touched the smooth fault line of her scar.

Her skin felt like it was on fire beneath my fingertips.