The Eleventh Plague

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.