The Eleventh Plague

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Caleb told us they were mercenaries,” Marcus said, looking down into his tea. “Ex-soldiers. I don’t know where he found them. He said they’d run the people at Fort Leonard off so they wouldn’t come back. That’s all. He said no one would get hurt.”

“What are you supposed to do for them?” Jenny asked.

“They want to expand west. Caleb said we’d be like a way station. Nothing more. They’d store fuel here, food. He didn’t tell us they were slavers, I swear.”

“When does it happen?”

“Tonight. Sundown. We’re supposed to meet them at the gates and then we all go together.”

“We have to talk to Caleb,” Violet said. “Now.”

Marcus looked up at her. “And say what? You don’t think Caleb and his friends know what these people are already?”

“Then we talk to everyone else. Sam, Tuttle — we’ll have a vote.”

“You think if we have a vote and we actually win, they’ll just leave?”

We all sat there, still as statues as it sunk in. Slavers were no different from starving animals. Deny them Fort Leonard and they’d eat Settler’s Landing just as happily.

“Then what?” Violet asked.

Marcus turned to face the swirl of white outside. It was mounting steadily on the porch and bending the trees until their branches hung down miserably, nearly ready to snap.

“We did well this year, but you know the winters as well as I do, Vi. We’ll lose at least ten people from the cold and lack of food alone. If we have to deal with Fort Leonard picking away at us too, we could be done for. Our home. All of us. Gone.”

“What are you saying? We let this happen? Marcus —”

“I’m saying we don’t have a choice, Vi.”

“We do,” Violet said. “We have a choice about what we become, Marcus. Maybe it’s the only thing we do have a choice about.”

“Do you want to be out there again? Us and not them? Is that what you want?”

“How many times have we come close to doing the right thing,” Violet asked, “and then stopped because we were afraid? This. Sean and Mary Krychek —”

“Violet.”

“— that girl of theirs, just nine years old?”

“We did the best we could for them.”

“We stood up for them for an hour before giving them an old blanket and a day’s worth of bread and sending them on their way! Because we were afraid!”

Violet was red with anger and shame, leaning up out of her chair, her nails digging into the table. Marcus had no answer for her.

The wind howled and the snow mixed with hail that sounded sharp and metallic, like fingers tapping on a tin roof.

“You remember that day we played Go Fish, Jenny?”

Everyone turned to Jackson. His back was to us, caught in the half-gloom at the edge of the kitchen, looking out past the marble-topped counter to the storm outside. “Yeah,” Jenny said. “I do.”

“Everyone in Fort Leonard is just waking up,” Jackson said, almost to himself, the words tumbling out. “They’re talking. Starting fires for breakfast. Wishing it wasn’t snowing. But then these people, us, will appear and some of them won’t live through the day. Some of them have maybe a few hours left until they’re gone, or their families are gone and they’re alone. And they have no idea it’s coming. They think it’s just another day.”

Jackson’s voice hitched in his throat. A redness crept into his cheeks like leaves of flame.

“Jack,” Marcus urged. “Listen to me. I don’t like it either, but it’s us or it’s them. It’s —”

Jackson turned from the window and faced Marcus head-on, searching his face. Marcus deflated. He dropped his head, looking down at his hands. They seemed so small now, framed against the hardness of the table.

Violet moved over to Jackson, wrapping her arms tight around him from behind.

“I’m afraid too,” Violet said to Marcus. “But if fear’s all we’ve got, then we’re building this world on the same rotten foundation as the last one. What good are we doing Jackson or Jenny or Stephen? What good are we doing anyone?”

Marcus turned and regarded each of us one by one, like we were a jury deciding his fate, before struggling up out of his chair and gathering his rifle and his coat.

I stood up at the table. “No,” I said, urgently. “You can’t fight them. If you try to be a hero —”

“Caleb lied to us,” Marcus said. “And he did it so he could turn this place into something none of us want it to be. This is our home. If this isn’t worth fighting for, then what is?”

Jackson left his mother and crossed the room to stand with Marcus. Together they went out into the front room. A moment later, the door shut with a deep boom that shuddered through the house.

No one moved for a time. The wind moaned. The finger-tap hail pattered on and on.

Violet went without another word to her cabinet. She lit candles and then opened each drawer one by one, taking inventory with crisp practiced motions, preparing for whatever was to come.

Beside me, Jenny sat with her chin resting on her fists, absorbed in the whirl of white. I pushed away from the table and went out the front door.

A rush of wind and snow blew toward me as I stepped outside and dropped down onto the front steps. Across the street, Marcus and Jackson moved from one house to the other. They’d disappear inside for a time, and when they came out they’d be joined by one or two others and they’d all move on, snaking their way through the town.

With their dark coats cutting through the snow, they reminded me of an army of black ants gathering to make a valiant stand against a farmer’s boot.

Behind me, the front door opened and closed. Jenny descended the steps and went to stand beyond the porch’s roof, looking from house to house, taking it all in.

“You’re staying,” I said. “Aren’t you?”

Jenny lifted her chin, examining the cottony sky. “I thought I could leave,” she said. “I thought it’d be easy. But I can’t. Not if they don’t.”

Everything in me ached. Of course Jenny would stay. She’d join with whoever Marcus could raise to fight Caleb and the slavers, and they’d all suffer.

And what could I do? Only one thing.

“I should get our things,” I said, looking down at the brick steps beneath my feet. “From the casino. Before anything starts.”

“Want me to come?”

I turned back to face her. Jenny stood on the porch with her hands jammed in the pockets of her coat, her hair a cloud of black. She was looking over my head, scanning the neighborhood, her eyes focused to a knife’s edge. There was no stopping her.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll do it myself.”

Jenny darted in and kissed my cheek. “Hurry up. It’d be a shame if the cold killed you before the slavers had a chance.”

I nodded and Jenny threw open the front door and went inside. I stood there a moment looking at the blank face of the door, listening to the falling snow, before I crossed the Greens’ front yard and went out into the street.

The walls to either side of the Settler’s Landing gates had never seemed more like two gravestones as I passed them and went into the forest. Looking out over the crumbling highway and the casino, everything seemed so far away. Jenny. Jackson. All of my friends. I wished the chain that bound me to them could be cut, but it was there, strong as ever.

I bypassed the casino and trekked some miles until I found the clearing where I’d buried Dad. In the center there was a swell in the blanket of white. My hands stung as I knelt in front of it and scooped the piles of snow away until I reached the loose dirt at the top of the grave. I pressed my palms deep into it. My breath dropped to a whisper. A yawning emptiness opened inside me.

I’m here, I thought. I’m right here.

I used Dad’s knife to cut a thick branch down from one of the surrounding trees, stripped it of its bark, and flattened one side. I held it in my lap and carved the letters of his name before plunging it deep into the ground at the head of his grave. When I was done, I traced my fingers over its surface.

STEPHEN R. QUINN.

I thought of Grandpa lying out alone in the woods so far away. If we had left a marker for him, it would have said the exact same thing. And soon so would mine.

I started to speak, to say good-bye, but it was like my mouth was stuffed with dead leaves and sand.

The wind rose, carrying the scent of pine and earth, and for a second I felt Jenny’s lips, soft and warm, against my cheek. She lingered there, her forehead at my temple, her breath on my neck. I had to shake her ghost away.

I drew my knife and tested its dark edge with my thumb. Though its surface was pitted and scarred and worn with age, it was still sharp. It killed me to lie to Jenny, but I knew that what I had to do, I had to do alone.