The Eleventh Plague

PART THREE





TWENTY-SIX

There was a crash as I fell into one of the gaming tables that littered the casino floor. How did I get here? I wondered distantly, then Jenny’s hands dug into my shoulder and pulled me up. She threw my arm over her shoulder and pushed me blindly through the dark. My bones ached from the cold. My skin burned. I couldn’t stop shivering. I remembered kneeling by the grave in the snow. I told her to leave me with Dad, but she wouldn’t listen. I wanted to tell her again, but now I couldn’t speak.

Jenny dropped me down on the bed in the back room and covered me up with all the blankets we had, tucking them tight around my body like a cocoon. I lay there in the absolute dark and quiet of the room. The blankets had my arms pinned to my sides. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t see. It was like being a thousand miles under the ocean with the immense weight of it pressing down on my chest.

But I wasn’t afraid. I was relieved. Finally, after all my running, I had arrived at the place I was meant to be, at home, at peace, in the nothingness and the dark and the cold.

The door opened and Jenny was at my side again, leaning over me.

Was it hours later? Days? I didn’t know. I couldn’t see her, just feel her arms digging under my shoulders and lifting me up.

I groaned, struggling against her touch, trying to keep still. “I’m fine. Leave me alone.”

“Stephen, you’re freezing to death. Now move!”

Jenny managed to get me up from the bed and out of the room, shoring me up with her shoulder and driving me down a long hallway. I couldn’t fight. I faltered along beside her, my legs stiff and awkward as a foal’s. We moved deeper into the casino toward a distant light. A fire. Jenny had built it in the center of a tiled atrium. Its smoke twisted upward to the shattered remains of a skylight.

She dropped me within inches of it. Its brilliance made my eyes ache, but I couldn’t feel its warmth. It reached out but couldn’t touch me. Jenny wrestled me up into a sitting position and arranged the blankets over my shoulders. I tried to push her away, but I was too weak. All I wanted to do was lie down. All I wanted was to sleep, to be in the quiet and alone in that black nothingness, but Jenny wouldn’t let me go.

There was a crash somewhere out in the casino, then the sound of shattering glass. Jenny stiffened. Dad’s knife appeared in her fist as she crouched beside me like an animal, peering into the dark, listening for more.

“There’s no one out there,” I said thoughtlessly, my head lolling onto my chest.

“Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Will and them aren’t done with us. They could still come.”

“They’re dead.”

Jenny’s eyes left the empty dark and fell back on me.

“What? Who’s dead?”

I looked up from the tiled floor. Jenny’s face, streaked with ash and pockmark burns, was framed in fire.

“Everyone,” I said, my voice rising up from the deep in a cold rasp. “Marcus. Violet. Dad. My mom. Even you and me. We thought the Collapse was over but it’s not. It just keeps going. It doesn’t matter where we go or what we do. We’re all dead. All of us. We just don’t know it yet.”

Jenny said nothing. She eased down beside me, bringing her body alongside mine. She brushed my hair aside with the tips of her fingers. When I flinched away from the warmth of her lips on my cheek, she wrapped her arms tight around me and leaned me in toward the fire, rocking us back and forth.

The heat from the fire pounded against my skin, but it was useless. My body was a gate of iron and I would not let it pass.

All that night, she left my side only to get more wood for the fire or to dart out into the darkness to check on the crashes and groans that seemed to be our constant companions. She was sure that each one was Will or Caleb or some faceless mob with torches in hand, ready to burn us down. But each time it was simply the old building settling into the brunt of winter. Broken glass. Creaking walls.

“We can’t stay here,” she said.

It had stopped snowing. A thin, watery light began to show through the clouds. The first traces of dawn.

“It isn’t safe.”

I turned toward the dim outline of the casino’s front door. Outside, across the parking lot and through the trees, was the clearing where Dad lay, buried deep underground. There was no cross. No marker. Jenny had pulled me away before I could make one. If we left, I knew I would never be able to find him again.

“You can go,” I said.

“I’m not leaving without you.”

Somewhere behind us, the roof of the casino groaned under the weight of the snow. I traced my finger along the hills and valleys of the wrinkled blanket piled up in my lap, marking out a meandering path on its folds. Never the same path twice, I thought. That way you’re safe. That way no one finds you. I saw myself on the trail. I saw worn ground and the mall and the neighborhoods, crumbling and covered in vines. I could hear Dad, his shuffling footsteps, his bright babble like water coursing over smooth river rocks. I saw his hands so clearly — long-fingered and strong, a hairline scar running down the index finger of his right hand.

“Steve?”

Jenny laid one hand over mine, blotting out the trail. She used the other to lift my chin up to her, so I couldn’t look away, couldn’t not see her.

“Maybe there isn’t anything better out there, but … your dad and your grandpa handed you this life, right? Just like Marcus and Violet handed me mine. This is your name. This is where you live. This is who you are. We never chose any of it. So whose lives are we living? Ours or theirs? Haven’t you ever thought about that? Don’t you, just once, want to choose something for yourself?”

I pulled my chin out of her hand and looked deep into the darkness of the casino.

“I have,” I said.

Jenny stared at me, her eyes wide and hurt, waiting for more, but I said nothing. She let go of my hand.

“I’m sorry about your parents,” she said. “But at least they died while they were trying to live. They didn’t just sit around waiting to die.”

Jenny pushed herself back from me and stood up.

“It’s not safe for us here, Stephen. I think you know that. There’s an old hospital a few miles west that’s still pretty intact. I’m going to leave for there today. I want you to come, but even if you don’t, I have to go.”

Jenny waited for a response, and when there was none, she walked away from the fire and was gone.

Without Jenny, the immensity of the casino’s silence was overwhelming. This was what I wanted, wasn’t it? On my own in the dark. I sat there while the fire died out, then stumbled back to our room. Before I drew the curtains shut, I surveyed my little world. I had shelter. I could find food and water easily enough. I had everything I needed.

My eye fell into the corner of the room by the window, to a large white square. I didn’t recognize it at first, but I moved closer and saw that it was Jenny’s sketch pad. It fell open to the end as I lifted it, to the last picture she had drawn.

It was like a small, soft hand had reached inside of me and pulled the air out of my lungs.

It was the picture Jenny drew our first morning together as I huddled, freezing, under the blankets. All the details of the barn were there: the patched-together plank walls, the early morning sunshine, the rumpled bed. You could almost feel the chill in the air. I was staring up into the rafters and my feet were sticking out of the cover, hanging slightly over the edge of the mattress. I smiled despite myself.

She had made me taller.

I kept coming back to the look on my face. I almost didn’t recognize myself. She caught me just as I was waking up, before my worries about Dad and the town had flooded in. I had, not a smile exactly — it was harder to place than that — but more a look of stillness, of thoughtfulness. Of peace. On my face was the look of someone who was exactly where he wanted to be with no thought of the future or the past. Nothing but that moment.

Jenny said that drawing quieted something inside her. I said I had nothing like that, but was I wrong? Wasn’t that what being with her did for me?

I thought back to that night out by the snowy highway, wondering if the answer was to walk away and disappear. If being alone might spare us the pain of feeling anything like Dad felt the day Mom’s hand slipped from his in the shadow of that amusement park. Maybe if we never built anything, then nothing could ever collapse.

We have to be more than the world would make us.

Mom’s words were like a warm breath blowing past my cheek.

The sketch pad fell out of my hands, and I drifted from the room and down the hallway, following the dim morning light toward the exit. I could just barely see Jenny standing outside.

The unbroken snow was dazzling, clean and white. She didn’t turn as I stepped through the door and came up beside her. The back of my hand grazed hers. Her fingers fell and intertwined with mine, locking together. I felt a deep sigh in my chest as something settled into place.

“I’m so sorry about your dad,” she said.

A chill spread over me again, but I pulled Jenny close. My heart thumped hard in my chest.

“They destroyed their world,” Jenny said, looking out over the vast plain of snow. “But this one is ours.”

“We should leave,” I said. “Today.”

We said nothing more for a while. I wished Dad could be there with us. Wished he could leave and come find whatever it was we would find. I wondered if there would always be this empty, aching place inside me where he used to be.

Jenny nudged me with her shoulder. “Come on, then. We’ve got some packing to do.”

She reached for the door, but before we could go in, there was a crunch of snow to our right. Tree branches shook. We jumped back into the doorway and out of sight.

“Probably just a deer,” I whispered, but then we saw two figures slide behind the curtain of trees. Once they passed, Jenny motioned me forward. I took her wrist, but she turned back and held up one finger.

Just a second, she mouthed.

I followed as Jenny moved to the corner and we both dropped down low to peer around to the back of the building. Two men emerged from the woods. I could tell immediately that they weren’t Will or Caleb or anyone we knew from Settler’s Landing. They moved in precise glides, short automatic rifles held ahead of them, communicating with crisp hand signals. They were both wearing some kind of black uniform, their shoulders and waists crisscrossed with pouches of equipment. They looked ex-military to me.

What are they doing here?

The two men circled the building, then disappeared around the other side. Jenny looked at me. I nodded. We moved along the back wall until we saw them climbing the hill toward the highway and Settler’s Landing.

“Scouts,” I whispered.

“For who? Fort Leonard doesn’t have any military.”

A buzz of nerves started to rise in my chest. “Come on,” I said. “We’ll pack up. Go. Like you said, this isn’t our —”

Before I could finish, Jenny leapt up from her crouch and ran for the highway.

“Jenny!” I hissed, then scrambled to my feet and went after her.

The scouts were a ways ahead of us by the time we made it to the woods, but we could follow their tracks easily enough. We didn’t catch sight of them again until we came out of the trees above Settler’s Landing’s gates. The men swept down the hill toward them, but instead of passing through, they veered sharply north and into the forest across from us.

“We should see how many of them there are. Maybe they’re camped nearby.”

“Jenny —”

“If it was just Fort Leonard against Settler’s Landing, I’d leave it, but if they’ve brought in help, we need to tell Marcus and Violet it’s not going to be a fair fight. Right?”

I hated the idea but had to admit she was right. I agreed, and we trailed the two scouts from as far back as we could. They followed pretty much the same path Jenny and I had the other night. I thought they were making straight for the Henrys’ house, but before they reached it they cut around it and went farther east, disappearing into thick trees.

When their footprints finally petered out, we dropped down onto the snowy ground and crawled up to a fallen tree that lay at the edge of some brush. Voices came from the other side, a mix of languages and accents. We glanced at each other, then peeked over the edge of the tree.

Less than a hundred feet from where we lay was a camp made up of black tents arranged in precise rows. Twenty of them, at least. Men like the two scouts we’d seen milled around, bristling with as many weapons and as much ammunition as they could carry. A fire burned at the center of the camp, and behind it sat a central tent that was flanked by three large dark shapes that sat just outside of the firelight.

Jenny looked at me, but I shrugged, unable to tell what they were. The forest curved around the north edge of the camp, so Jenny and I pulled back from our hiding place and crawled until the three dark shapes became all too clear.

The one closest to us was a flatbed truck. On its back there was an immense metal canister with a hose running from one side of it. A fuel truck, I guessed, meant to service what sat next to it — two hulking black jeeps, their sides and fronts plated with armor and an open back where heavy machine guns were mounted on rotating tripods.

It was like looking at two prehistoric monsters. Both of us stared in awe, speechless at what was looming over Settler’s Landing as it quietly slept just a few miles away.

“How could Fort Leonard afford mercenaries?” I whispered. “Aren’t they smaller than Settler’s Landing?”

Before Jenny could answer, there was a commotion in the camp as the black flap of one of the central tents opened. Two figures walked out and everything inside of me froze.

No. It can’t be.

The black man’s dreadlocks were longer than the last time I’d seen him, and so was his beard. The white man with the scar seemed, if anything, bigger. There was no doubt who they were though. Their faces were seared into my memory.

Not mercenaries.

Slavers.

The air rushed out of me as I realized exactly what Fort Leonard would have offered them in exchange for ending the war once and for all. They offered them Marcus and Violet and Jackson. They offered them Tuttle and Martin and Derrick and Wendy. They offered them everyone and everything in Settler’s Landing.

“Stephen?” Jenny whispered.

She grabbed my arm and pulled me deeper into the forest, away from the camp. Once we couldn’t hear them anymore, we eased down the back side of a slope, pressing our backs into the snow.

“We’ll tell Marcus,” Jenny said. “Warn them. Maybe if they know what’s coming —”

I almost laughed. The thought that they had a chance against these people, that they could even risk that, was ridiculous.

“They’ll have to go,” I said. “All of them. Take what they can and leave.”

“Leave Settler’s Landing? They won’t. Marcus and Violet? They’d die first.”

My fists curled in on themselves. She was right. God, what had I started? Were they here because of me too? Had they come looking for me and Dad and found Fort Leonard instead?

We sat there, a moat of empty space between us. Jenny chewed on her thumbnail, staring at the ground. We both knew what was coming.

I had seen it in the belly of that plane and she had seen it in a mass of men with their guns and their wild, hungry looks.

“It’s not our fault,” Jenny said. “What we did was stupid, but it was Caleb who went to Fort Leonard. Not us. He started this.”

I murmured something in agreement, but I didn’t believe it and I knew Jenny didn’t either.

A light snow began to fall again, whipping through the trees and tapping against our shoulders. A laugh, loud and throaty, rose from the slave traders’ camp. It was like the grunting of an animal ready to hunt.

I took Jenny’s hand and we fled through the woods.

Violet and Marcus were at the kitchen table when we arrived. Violet was at one end, knitting distractedly, while Marcus leaned grimly over a mug of tea.

“What is it?” Violet asked.

Before I could speak, Jackson came thundering down the stairs. I felt a flash of happiness to see him again but as soon as he saw me and Jenny, he stopped where he was, grasping the rail and eyeing us sharply.

“What are they doing here?”

The way he spat it out, I knew instantly that Marcus told him everything about our raid on the Henrys’. How we had started all of this. My mouth went dry. I felt sick. Ashamed.

“Come sit down, Jackson,” Violet said. “Stephen and Jenny say they have something to tell us.”

Jackson crept down the stairs, then took a seat at the far end of the kitchen table. He didn’t look at me and I found I couldn’t look at any of them. How could I? I’d abandoned Jackson, stolen from Violet, and betrayed Marcus and everyone else in the town. “Well, Stephen?” Violet said.

They all sat there watching us. Waiting. I clasped Jenny’s hand under the table and told them about the slavers that Fort Leonard had hired. The jeeps. The weapons. That they were the same ones my Dad and I had fought. Everything.

When I was done, Marcus rubbed his hand over the thick collection of stubble on his chin.

“Slavers,” Marcus said carefully. “You’re sure?”

I nodded. “I’m sure.”

Marcus looked across the table at Violet, but she stared down into her lap, all the color drained from her face.

“I know you don’t want to leave,” I said. “But you don’t know what these people will do. They —”

“They won’t do anything,” Jenny interrupted.

I turned to where Jenny sat beside me.

“What do you mean? Of course they —”

But Jenny wasn’t looking at me. She was focused on her parents. Her parents, who wouldn’t meet her gaze.

“Will they?” Jenny asked, holding the words out like bait. Marcus and Violet said nothing. Jackson didn’t move.

“I don’t …”

And then I got it. I saw what Jenny saw.

Ever since the night of our raid on the Henrys’, they should have been expecting the forces of Fort Leonard to arrive at any moment. But if they did, then why was Violet sitting at the table knitting? Shouldn’t she have been preparing for the coming fight? Shouldn’t Marcus’s rifle be close at hand instead of sitting in its rack on the wall?

And when I told them that a small army of slave traders was bearing down on them, they didn’t seem scared. They didn’t pack up. They didn’t flee town.

Most of all, they didn’t seem surprised.

I felt something like a barbed hook sinking into my gut and in that instant I knew.

Fort Leonard didn’t hire the slavers.

They did.