The Eleventh Plague

FOUR

Once the men fell asleep Dad and I slipped on our packs, then unfolded ourselves from behind the panel. It helped that the rain hadn’t slacked off. The constant thrumming echoed through the metal coffin of the plane, helping mask our movements.

We crept across the uneven floor, squeezed through the bulkhead, and emerged on the other side. As we moved into the firelight, the woman nearly gasped, but Dad held up his hands to show we were no harm. She glanced over at the sleeping men. For a second I thought she was going to warn them, but then she sat back and watched us through narrowed eyes. Dad slipped his hunting knife out of its sheath and handed it to me. Then he turned and leveled his rifle at the sleeping men.

As I approached, knife in hand, the boy woke with a start. His eyes were as big as lily pads. I put my finger to my lips to quiet him, then slipped the blade under his bonds and cut them. He rubbed his wrists and stared up at me blankly.

“They won’t let you get away with this,” the woman hissed. “They won’t let you take us.”

“We’re not taking you,” I said, sawing through the leather reins that bound them to the plane. “We’re freeing you.”

The woman actually laughed. It was a dreadful, breathy thing. “What do you expect us to do? Just run out into this storm? And then what?”

I glanced out the opening. The whole world was a gray mass of pounding rain and wind. She was right. They wouldn’t get far. And as weak as they looked, even if the slavers never caught up to them again, they were as good as dead. I turned to Dad. His brows furrowed as he searched the muck at his feet for an answer.

“But if we had their jeep …”

I turned. The woman was pointing to where the black man lay sprawled out by the dwindling fire. A ring of keys was clipped to one of his belt loops.

“If you really want to help us,” she said, “we need the keys.”

I shook my head. If she thought we were getting any closer to those men than we already were, she was insane. I was about to signal that we should go, but by the time I did, Dad was already slipping the rifle over his shoulder and crouching down into the mud.

“Dad, no.”

He waved me off. There was nothing else I could do. Any more and I’d wake them. I had to stand there and watch as Dad crept closer to the sleeping men. The black man’s chest rose and fell as he snored. The fire crackled. Dad halved the distance between them before his foot hit some debris and he pitched forward. I gasped, but he got his hand up on the wall just in time to stop himself.

Dad took a shaky breath, then another painstaking step forward. He was less than a foot away now. The fire was bright red on his face, and his wrinkled forehead glistened with sweat. Slowly, painfully, he knelt down. Thunder boomed overhead and he froze for a second, looking at the man’s face, studying it for any hint of consciousness. When he saw none, he reached his hand out little by little until the tips of his fingers brushed the metal keys, then crawled up their length toward the clasp. My stomach was a knot. Dad pinched the clasp open gently and then slowly, achingly slowly, he pulled the keys away and they fell into his palm. My heart leapt. “Put the keys down.”

The man with the scar was up on his knees. An enormous gun grew out of his hand and was pointed directly at Dad’s head. “Now.”

Everything was deadly still for a split second, but then Dad jerked to one side, tossing the keys at me as he did it. “Run!” he shouted.

I scrambled to catch them but the woman sprang up behind me and pushed me down, snatching the keys out of the air. There was a boom, deafening in the steel walls of the plane, as the man’s gun rang out. Thank God he was drunk. The bullet missed Dad by inches and slammed into the ground.

Dad scrambled toward me as the black man woke and pulled his own gun out of its holster. The slavers slid out of their places, weaving in their still-drunk state. Dad didn’t say a word. He leveled the rifle and fired, its report pounding at my ears. The bullet went high, ricocheting with a wet-sounding ping. The men stumbled backward, surprised.

“We don’t want any trouble,” Dad announced.

“They’re ours,” the man with the scar slurred in a deep Southern accent.

Dad kept his voice level. “Not anymore.”

The slaver laughed. It sounded like a landslide, boulders tumbling together. He slapped his partner in the chest and they got on their feet and came toward us.

“Get back,” Dad commanded, backing up and jutting the rifle out in front of him, but the men just laughed and kept coming. They must have heard the fear that had crept into his voice. They saw us for what we were. We were no heroes.

I backed out of the plane. The woman and the boy were already gone. As I stepped outside the slavers’ jeep was revving up and pulling away.

“Wait!” I screamed, but the woman didn’t even look back as she took off with the boy beside her. Red taillights glowed in their wake.

Dad tumbled out of the plane and fired two more shots over the men’s heads, sending them ducking inside. Then he turned and headed toward me.

“Run,” he called. “Go!”

The two slavers emerged from the plane behind him. “Dad! Look out!”

Drunk or not, the man with the scar moved fast. He was on Dad in a second, grabbing the top of his backpack and yanking him backward. Dad lost the rifle and his pack, but he whipped around and threw a punch that glanced off the man’s head. It didn’t do much damage but it knocked him back, into the mud. The black man came at him now.

Dad turned and screamed, “Just go!” as the man slammed into his back and they hit the ground, grappling in the mud. The man with the scar was coming at Dad from behind so I scooped up the rifle and swung it by the barrel like a club. The heavy stock struck him on the back of the head and sent him down again.

Dad reared back and threw a solid punch to the black man’s face, dropping him into the mud with his partner.

“Run!” Dad yelled again.

We took off, blind from the pounding rain that turned the world around us a featureless gray. Paolo brayed as we passed him. There was no other choice. We’d have to come back for him. We’d never escape with him in tow.

I couldn’t tell if the men were chasing us or the woman, so I just ran, cradling the mud-covered rifle in my arms, desperately trying to keep up with Dad, who was little more than a flickering shadow darting ahead of me. The thunder pounded constantly, atomic blasts of it, following blue-white flares of lightning. Every time, I ducked instinctively, like I was expecting a shower of shrapnel to follow.

Who knows how long we ran, or how far. At some point I crashed into what felt like an oak tree. I tried to dodge around it, but then I looked up and saw it was Dad.

“Do you see them?” He had to lean right down by my ear and shout for me to hear him at all.

“I can’t see anything!”

Dad turned all around, sheets of water coursing off his head and shoulders. I wanted to scream that it was pointless, that we needed to keep running, but then there was another flash of lightning and a crack, and for a second it seemed like there might be a ridge of some kind out ahead of us. Dad grabbed my elbow and pulled us toward it.

“Come on! Maybe there’s shelter!”

By then, the ground had turned to a slurry of mud and rocks and wrecked grass. Every few steps my feet would sink into it and I’d have to pull myself out one foot at a time, terrified that I’d lose sight of Dad and be lost out in that gray nothing, forever.

As we ran, the ridge ahead of us became more and more solid, a looming black wall. I prayed for a cave, but even a good notch in the rock wall would have been enough to get us out of the rain and hide until morning. We were only about fifty feet from it when Dad came to an abrupt halt.

“Why are we stopping?!”

Dad didn’t say anything, he simply pointed.

Between us and the ridge there was an immense gash in the earth, a gorge some thirty feet across and another thirty deep, with steep, muddy walls on our side and the ridge on the opposite. A boiling mess of muddy water, tree stumps, and trash raged at the bottom.

Dad searched left and right for a crossing, but there wasn’t any. His shoulders slumped. Even through the curtain of rain I could see the sunken hollow of his eyes, deep red-lined pits that sat in skin as gray as the air around us.

“I’m sorry, Stephen. I swear to God, I’m so sorry.”

I reached out for his arm, to tell him it was going to be okay, that we’d be fine, but before my fingers could even graze his soaked coat, the ground beneath his feet disappeared. What was solid ground turned to mud in an instant and he went flailing, flying backward. There was a flash of lightning as he fell, arms pinwheeling, his mouth open in a shocked O. There was nothing at his back but thirty feet of open air and, beyond that, the bared fangs of a raging river.

When the lightning subsided, he was gone.