The Eleventh Plague Read online

  THE ELEVENTH PLAGUE

  JEFF HIRSCH

  SCHOLASTIC PRESS

  NEW YORK

  To Gretchen.

  You never stop changing my world for the better.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Part Two

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Part Three

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  ONE

  I was sitting at the edge of the clearing, trying not to stare at the body on the ground in front of me. Dad had said we’d be done before dark, but it had been hours since the sun went down and he was still only waist deep in the hole, throwing shovelfuls of dirt over his shoulder.

  Even though it was covered in the burlap shroud I could see how wasted Grandpa’s body was. He’d always been thin, but the infection had taken another ten pounds off him before he went. His hand fell out from a tear in the burlap. Shadowed from the moonlight, it was a desert plain, the tracks of the veins like dry riverbeds winding up the crags of his knuckles. A gold Marine Corps ring sat on one finger, but it barely fit anymore.

  Dad’s shovel chewed through rocks and clay with an awful scrape. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and escaped into the thicket of trees that surrounded us, stumbling through the darkness until I came to the edge of the hill we were camped on.

  Far below were the slouching ruins of an old mall. Rows of cars, rusting in the moist air, sat in the parking lot, still waiting for the doors to open. Beyond the mall, the arches of a McDonald’s sign hovered like a ghost.

  I remembered seeing it for the first time, ten years ago. I was five and then the sign had towered in its red and gold plastic. It seemed gigantic and beautiful. One trillion served. Now fingers of vines crept up its base, slowly consuming more and more of the rusty metal.

  I wondered how long it would be until they made it to the top and the whole thing finally collapsed. Ten years? Twenty? Would I be Dad’s age? Grandpa’s?

  I took a breath of the cool air, but the image of Grandpa’s hand lying there on the ground loomed in the back of my mind. How could it be so still?

  Grandpa’s hand only made sense in motion, rearing back, the gold ring flashing as it crashed into my cheek. He had so many rules. I could never remember them all. The simple act of setting up camp was a minefield of mistakes, and Dad and I both seemed to trip over every one. I could still feel the sting of the metal and the rasp of his calloused skin.

  But that’s over, I told myself. We’re on our own now. Grandpa’s fist was just another bit of wreckage we were leaving behind.

  “Stephen!”

  My chest tightened. It wasn’t cold enough for a fire, but I didn’t want to go back with nothing to do so I collected an armful of wood and brush on the way. I dropped it all between our sleeping bags, then leaned over the tinder, scraping the two pieces of my fire starter together until a spark caught. Once I had a proper campfire, I sat back on my heels to watch it burn.

  “Think it’s deep enough yet?”

  Dad was leaning against the wall of the grave, his body slick with sweat and dirt. I nodded.

  “Come on, then. Bring the ropes.”

  Once I helped Dad out of the hole, we knelt on either side of Grandpa’s body and drew lengths of rope under his knees and back. Dad started to lift him, but I didn’t move. Grandpa’s hand, one finger crowned with gold, was only inches from me.

  “What about his ring?”

  The ends of the ropes went limp in Dad’s hands. The ring glinted in the firelight. I knew he stung from it just like I did.

  “There’s gotta be a half ounce of solid gold there,” I said. “If not more.”

  “Let’s just do this.”

  “But don’t we have to —?”

  “Stephen, now,” Dad snapped.

  We lowered Grandpa into the grave and then, before I could even pull the ropes out, Dad began filling it in again. I knew I should stop him. We could have traded Grandpa’s ring for food, new clothes, even bullets. Dad knew that as well as I did.

  When the grave was filled, the shovel slipped from Dad’s hands and he fell to his knees, doubling over with his arms around his stomach. His body seized with small tremors.

  Oh God. Don’t let him be sick too.

  I reached out to him. “Dad?”

  When he turned, the light caught tears cutting channels through the dirt on his face. I turned toward the woods as he sobbed, giving him what privacy I could, a knot twisting tighter and tighter inside me. When he was done I laid his favorite flannel shirt over his shoulders. Dad drew it around him with a shaky breath, then searched the stars through red, swollen eyes.

  “I swear,” he exhaled. “That man was a purebred son of a bitch.”

  “Maybe we should put that on his tombstone.”

  Dad surprised me with a short, explosive laugh. I sat beside him, edging my body alongside the steady in and out of his breath. He draped his arm, exhausted, over my shoulder. It felt good, but still the knot in my stomach refused to unravel.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah, Steve?”

  “We’ll be okay, won’t we? Without him?” When Dad said nothing I moved out from under his arm and looked up at him.

  “I mean … nothing’s going to change. Right?”

  Dad fixed his eyes past me and onto the dark trail we would start down the next morning.

  “No,” he said, his words rising up like ghosts, thin and pale and empty. “Nothing’s ever going to change.”

  TWO

  We clawed our way out of our sleeping bags just before sunrise, greeted each other with sleepy-eyed grumbles, and got to work.

  I dealt with Dad’s backpack first, making sure the waterproof bag inside was intact before loading in our first-aid kit and the few matches we had left. I did it carefully, still half expecting to hear Grandpa’s voice explode behind me as he wrenched the bag out of my hand and showed me how to do it right. I paused. Breathed. He’s gone, I told myself. I reached back in and felt for our one photograph, making sure it was still there, like I did every morning, and then moved on.

  As I arranged the clothes in my pack, my hand hit the spine of one of my books. The Lord of the Rings. I had found it years before in a Walmart, buried underneath a pile of torn baby clothes and the dry leaves that had blown in when the walls had fallen. I’d read it start to finish six times, always waiting until after Grandpa went to sleep. He’d said the only thing books were good for was kindling.

  I flipped through the book’s crinkled pages and placed it at the very top of the bag so it would be the first thing my fingers touched when I reached inside. Doing this gave me a rebel thrill. I didn’t have to worry about Grandpa finding it now.

  When I went to water our donkey, Paolo, I found Dad staring down at something in the back of the wagon — Grandpa’s hunti
ng rifle. It was lying right where he’d left it two days earlier, when he’d become too weak to lift it anymore.

  Dad reached down and ran the tips of his fingers along the rifle’s scarred body.

  “So … this is mine now.”

  He lifted the rifle into his arms and slid the bolt back. One silver round lay there, sleek and deadly. “Guess so,” I said.

  Dad forced a little smile as he hung the rifle from his shoulder. “I’ll have to figure out how to work it, then, huh?” he joked, a dim twinkle in his eye. “Come on, pal. Let’s get out of here.”

  As Dad started down the trail, I turned for a last look at Grandpa’s grave. How many such mounds had we seen as we walked from one end of the country to the other, year after year? Sometimes it was one or two at a time, scattered like things misplaced. Sometimes there were clusters of hundreds, even thousands, littering the outskirts of dead cities.

  It was still hard to believe his death could have come so quickly. After all that he had survived — the war, the Collapse, the chaos that followed — to be taken by … what? An infection? Pneumonia? The flu? We had no idea. He was like a thousand-year-old oak, scarred and twisted, that was somehow chopped down in a day. It made me feel sick inside, but some part of me was glad. Like we had been freed.

  I was about to ask if Dad wanted to make some kind of marker before we left, but he had already moved down the trail.

  “Come on, P,” I said, tugging on Paolo’s lead and guiding him away.

  The sun rose as we moved off the hill, pushing some of the chill out of the air. We passed the mall and crossed a highway. On the other side there was a church with the blackened wreck of an army truck sitting in front of it. Beside that were tracts of abandoned houses, their crumbling walls and smashed windows reminding me of row after row of skulls.

  It was almost impossible to imagine the lives of the people who’d lived and worked in these places before the Collapse. The war had started five years before I was born, and over nothing, really. Dad said a couple of American students backpacking in China were caught where they shouldn’t have been and mistaken for spies. He said it wouldn’t have been that big a deal, except that at around the same time the oil was running out, and the Earth was getting warmer, and a hundred other things were going wrong. Dad said everyone was scared and that fear had made the world into a huge pile of dried-out tinder — all it needed was a spark. Once the fire caught it didn’t take more than a couple years to reduce everything to ruins. All that survived were a few stubborn stragglers like us, holding on by our fingernails.

  We made it through what was left of the town, then came to a wide run of grass, framed by trees with leaves that had begun to turn from vivid shades of orange and red to muddy brown. We shifted east, then dropped into the steady pace we’d maintain until it was time to jog south for the final leg.

  “We’re gonna be fine,” Dad said, finally breaking the silence of the morning. “You know that, right?”

  The knot from the previous night tightened in my throat. I swallowed it away and said that I did.

  “The haul isn’t too bad,” Dad continued, glancing back at the wagon, which was filled with a few pieces of glass and some rusted scrap metal. “And hey, who knows? Remember the time we came across that stash of Star Wars stuff in — where was it? Columbus? Maybe we’ll wake up tomorrow morning and find, I don’t know, a helicopter. In perfect working order! Gassed up and ready to go!”

  “Casey’d probably like that more than a bunch of old Star Wars toys.”

  “Well, who knew the little nerd preferred Battlestar Galactica?”

  Casey, or General Casey as he liked to call himself, was the king of the Southern Gathering. His operation sat at the top of what was once called Florida and was where Dad and I traded whatever salvage we could find for things like clothes and medicine and bullets.

  “We still got ten pairs of socks out of it,” I said. “How many do you think we could get for a helicopter?”

  “What? Are you kidding? We wouldn’t trade it!”

  “Not even for socks?”

  “Hell no. We’d become freelance helicopter pilots! Imagine what people would give us to take a ride in the thing.” Dad shot his fist in the air. “It’d be a gold mine, I tell ya!”

  Dad laughed and so did I. It was a little forced, but I thought maybe it was like a promise, a way to remind ourselves that things would be okay again soon.

  It grew warmer as the morning passed. Around noon we settled onto a dilapidated park bench and pulled out our lunch of venison jerky and hardtack. Paolo munched nearby, the metal bits of his harness tinkling gently.

  Dad grew quiet. He took a few bites and then stared west, into the woods. Once I was done eating I pulled a needle and thread out of my pack and set to fixing a tear in the elbow of my sweatshirt.

  “You should eat,” I said, drawing the needle through the greasy fabric and pulling it tight.

  “Not hungry, I guess.”

  A flock of birds swarmed across the sky, cawing loudly before settling on the power lines that ran like a seam down our path. I wondered if they had been able to do that before the Collapse, back when electricity had actually moved through the wires. And if not, which brave bird had been the first one to give it a shot once the lights had all gone out?

  Distracted, I let the needle lance into my fingertip. I recoiled and sucked on it until the blood stopped. I heard Grandpa’s raspy voice. Pay attention to what you’re doing, Stephen. It doesn’t take a genius to concentrate. I leaned back over the sleeve, trying to keep the stitches tight like Mom had taught me.

  “I keep expecting to see him,” Dad said. “Hear him.”

  I pulled the thread to a stop and looked over my shoulder at Dad.

  “Was he different?” I asked. “Before?”

  Dad leaned his head back and peered up into the sky.

  “On the weekends he’d take me to the movies. He worked a lot so that was our time together. We’d see everything. Didn’t matter what. Stupid things. It wasn’t about the movie, it was about us being there. But then everything fell apart and your grandma died … I guess he didn’t want to live through that pain again so he became what he thought he had to become to keep the rest of us alive.”

  Even though it was still fairly warm out, Dad shivered. He wrapped his coat and his arms tight around his body, then stared at the ground and shook his head.

  “I’m so sorry, Steve,” he said, a tired quiver in his voice. “I’m sorry I ever let him —”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  I snapped the thread with my teeth and yanked on the fabric. It held. Good enough. I slipped the sweatshirt on and zipped it up. “You ready?”

  Dad didn’t move. He was focused on a stand of reedy trees across the way, almost as though he recognized something in the deep swirl of twigs and dry leaves. When I looked all I saw was a rough path, barely wide enough for our wagon.

  “You find that helicopter?”

  Dad’s shoulders rose and fell and he let out a little puff of breath, the empty shape of a laugh.

  “Better get going then, huh? We can start south here.”

  There were heavy shadows, like smears of ash, under Dad’s red-rimmed eyes as he turned to me. For a second it was like he was looking at a stranger, but then he pulled his lips into a grin and slapped me on the knee.

  “Reckon so, pardner,” he said as he lumbered up off the bench and hung the rifle on his shoulder once again. “Reckon it’s time to get on down the road.”

  I took Paolo’s lead and gave it a pull. Dad hovered by the bench, staring back at the path west, almost hungrily, his thumb tucked under the rifle’s strap.

  I stayed Paolo and waited. What was he doing?

  But then, in a flash, it was gone, and Dad shook his head, pulling himself away from that other path and joining me. He ruffled my hair as he passed by, and we began what would be the last leg of our yearly trip south.

  “Hey! Look at that.” />
  We were moving across a grass-covered plain. Dad was out front, facing west, shading his eyes from the glare. I stepped up next to him, but all I saw was a dark hill. It seemed out of place in the middle of the flat plain, but was otherwise unremarkable.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Dad raised the rifle’s scope to his eye. “Well, it ain’t a helicopter,” he said as he handed me the rifle. “Looks like a bomber.”

  “No. Really?” I lifted the rifle and peered through the scope. That’s what it was, all right. About forty feet tall. Whole, it probably would have been over a hundred and fifty feet long, but it was broken up into two sections at the wing, with a long section in back and a shorter one up front. The whole thing was covered in dirt, vines, and a mantle of rust.

  The remnants of a cleared stand of trees lay between us and the plane. It looked like it had been cut down only a year or so ago. I figured that must have been why we hadn’t seen the plane the last time we’d come this way. How long had it been sitting there? Fifteen years? More?

  I drew the scope down along the length of the plane, marveling at its size, until I came to the tail where I could make out a big white star.

  “It’s American,” I said, lowering the rifle.

  Dad nodded. “B-88,” he said. “Probably heading to Atlanta. Or Memphis. I don’t think it crashed, though — it’s pretty intact. Looks like it tried to land and failed. Must have been forced down somehow.”

  I waited for him to make the next move, but he went silent after that, staring at it. Adults were always weird when it came to talking about the Collapse. Embarrassed, I thought, like kids caught breaking something that wasn’t theirs.

  “Well … we better check it out. Right?”

  “Guess we better. Come on.”

  We got to the plane about an hour later. The two halves sat just feet from each other, like pieces of a cracked egg. The plane’s wings were hunched over and crumpled. A bright bloom of flowers had grown up around them, taking root and shining purple in the sun.

  I led Paolo over to where he could munch on some flowers and followed Dad to the opening. The plane had split in two just behind the cockpit, which was closed off with loads of twisted metal. To our right was the empty bomb bay. I leaned in, squinting past the wreckage. It was bright at the mouth of the steel cave, but toward the back it grew dark enough that I could only make out a jumble of broken metal covered with dirt and vines and weeds.