The Eleventh Plague

FIVE

I didn’t think, I just jumped, sliding down the muddy wall, then tumbling end over end when it collapsed beneath me. I hit a small piece of ground at the bottom, a tiny shore, and pulled myself up out of the mud.

“Dad!” I screamed, searching the river and the opposite shore for some sign of him, but it was useless. “Dad!”

Another lightning flash and I caught a glimpse of something large in the water, moving fast downstream. I tugged off my pack, stripped down to my shorts and T-shirt, and dove in.

The icy water ripped the breath out of me as soon as I hit it. I had to struggle to move and get my blood flowing again. It took all my strength to stay focused on the big shadow in the water downstream and avoid the outcroppings of rock and the logs that shot by. I knew it could have been anything — a tree, or a clot of mud and rock — but I dug my arms hard into the cold water, praying, pulling for it.

I was only a few feet away when a flash of something dark and a thrashing arm shot up out of the churn. Yes! I stabbed my arms into the water and managed to get ahold of the collar of his coat. I pulled him to me but only had him for a second before we slammed sideways into a rock jutting out of the water. Dad shot away again headfirst down the river. He wasn’t moving. His body was limp, tossed about and swept away by the current.

The cold sank deeper into my body, seizing on my muscles, paralyzing them. I let out a scream and pushed off the rock I was stuck on, thrashing through the water. A surge in the current rocketed me forward. I was almost on him. I reached, missed, then reached again, feeling the barest whisper of his coat against my fingertips. The third time I caught him.

I scrambled forward, catching hold of his shoulder, hooking my arm under his armpit, and dragging him to me. Soaked with water, he was incredibly heavy. The current tried to suck him away and under, but I managed to draw him to my chest and kick off toward a shallow area at the edge of the river. I kicked and kicked, dragging us toward the shore, pushing Dad ahead of me and then climbing out after him.

I turned him over onto his stomach and leaned over him, putting all of my weight into his back, hoping to push out whatever water was in his lungs. He was bleeding from the back of his head. Thick clots of blood pooled at the base of his neck and then washed away, misty red in the rain. I was pretty sure his right arm was broken in more than one place, maybe a leg too. I turned him over onto his back. His skin was a ghastly blue-gray in the low light. His mouth was hanging open. A voice in my head, Grandpa’s sandpaper rasp, told me he was dead.

I laid my ear up against his mouth and listened as hard as I could, clapping my hand over my other ear to block out the rain. At first there was nothing, just empty silence, but then there was a flutter, and the slightest rise in his chest. He was alive!

I pulled him farther from the edge of the water, his waterlogged clothes adding twenty pounds or more. The muscles in my arms and back and legs howled, but I made it to the ridge and found a deep depression in the rock. It wasn’t as good as a cave, but it would have to do.

I dragged Dad in and laid him on his side in case he started throwing up water. I thought about trying to go back for our stuff. There were some medical supplies on the wagon — bandages, antiseptic — but God knew how far away it was, and the storm, if anything, was getting worse. Instead, I pushed myself into the hollow beside him.

Blood was pouring out of the gash on his head. I tore off my T-shirt and ripped it into strips with my teeth and used them to pack off and bind the wound, trying my best to ignore the soft broken feel at the back of his skull. My breath froze in my chest as the blood advanced through the cloth, eating through several layers before finally stopping and holding still. I breathed again.

I wanted to do something about his arm and leg, but what they needed was some sort of splint. That clearly wasn’t possible, so I had to let it go. They looked bad, but not life threatening.

My biggest problem was the cold. The depression we were in only gave us a bit of shelter from the wind and the rain. There was no brush to pack around us and no possibility of a fire. I wasn’t sure if it was cold enough to kill us, though I suspected if it fell another five to ten degrees during the night, it might be. I strained, trying to think of some other option, but finally had to admit that there was none.

I sat up with Dad all that night, clutching him to my chest and fighting the waves of exhaustion that threatened to drag me under. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t leave him alone. As the lightning slashed the dark and the rain poured around us, all I could think about was the bear.

I was seven. We were camped in dense forest way up north at the Canadian border, a day or two from the Northern Gathering. The trees in Canada were the biggest I had ever seen, standing close together in impenetrable ranks with thick, nut-brown hides and a tangle of branches and leaves that nearly blotted out the sun.

I didn’t plan to wander off, but when we got to our campsite and Mom, Dad, and Grandpa began setting up, I saw a robin at the edge of the clearing. It flew off as I approached it but I kept on going, drawn toward a pile of smooth rocks or a splash of sunlight on the pine needle–covered ground. It was a beautiful morning, cool and misty, with only the first stirrings of animals to keep me company. Before I knew it the forest had closed behind me and I was alone. I wasn’t scared. It was thrilling being off the path. I dodged through the trees, down a hill, and deeper into the woods. It grew dim and hushed all around, the air full with the smell of decaying things.

It wasn’t long before I found the video game. It was one of the big stand-up ones that Dad said they used to have in arcades when he was a kid. It was sitting at an odd canted angle, half on, half off a thick tree root that had sprung out of the ground. It said MORTAL KOMBAT on its side and was covered with colorful pictures of gigantic men and women in masks grappling with one another. The paint was peeling off in places, revealing a rusty metal surface underneath. Who knew how it got there? We ran into things like it, strange misplaced relics, from time to time.

I crunched through fallen leaves and up onto a little metal step at the bottom that raised me higher so I was face-to-face with the machine. Mom said she had played these constantly when she was a kid, before her parents finally broke down and bought her a home system. Down by my knees were two slots for coins. I reached into my pocket and mimed dropping two in, then started jerking the hand controls around, imagining the characters fighting it out at my command, making the sounds of punches and kicks with my mouth.

Bam. Bam. Baf. Crash. Ugh!

Leaves crunched behind me.

A twig snapped.

My hands froze on the controls.

I saw his outline first, a great looming thing reflected in the glass of the game. When I turned, the bear was maybe fifteen feet away, staring at me through the low tree branches, his mouth hanging open, teeth glistening. I guessed he had to weigh five hundred pounds or more. The bear’s head was lowered, his brown muzzle thrust out at me, sniffing. His blank black eyes were fixed at the center of my chest.

I thought my heart would crack a rib the way it was pounding. The thing lumbered forward, slow and awkward as a nightmare, until he halved the distance between us.

He was close enough now that his breath, smelling like the humid rot of a swamp, struck my chest like an open palm. His black-spotted tongue lolled around in his mouth and over the peaks of his fangs. The bear reared back, then opened his maw and roared. It went on and on and the sound of it, so close, dropped me to my knees in the grass. Everything inside me, everything I had ever felt, or thought, or hoped for, was pushed aside like a river tearing away soil and grass and trees, leaving only bedrock.

The bear raised one paw to close the remaining distance between us when an explosion rocked the air. The bear flinched, whipped its head backward, and roared, but then there was another explosion and the bear crumpled into a heap at my feet. His lungs filled once and then collapsed with a slow whine.

Someone was racing through the woods toward me, but I couldn’t look away from the bear. I had never been so close to something so wild, yet so still. I reached out, brushed my hand along the rough grain of his fur, and started to cry.

Dad dropped to his knees beside me. The barrel of Grandpa’s rifle was still smoking as he wrapped his arms around me, pulling me tight to his chest. I could feel his own heart pounding.

“You’re safe,” he said over and over, rocking me back and forth and crying too. “I’m here, Stephen, and you’re safe. You’re safe.”

Safe.

The war of rain and lightning and thunder hammered on throughout the night. I looked up at the gorge’s edge high above us, but I knew that no rescuer would appear. There was no one left. There was only me.

I wrapped my arms around Dad as tight as I could, shivering, hoping our little bit of body heat would be enough to keep us alive until the rain stopped and the sun rose.

It had only been twenty-four hours since Grandpa died.