The Eleventh Plague Read online

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t look like there’s anything here. Maybe we should —”

  “It’s gonna be fine,” Dad said. “We’ll make it quick. In and out, okay?”

  “We’ll need the flashlight.”

  Dad tugged at the end of his beard, then nodded. I pulled the light off the back of the wagon and rejoined him. There was a narrow catwalk that led alongside the bomb bay to the back of the plane. Dad stepped up onto it and shuffled crablike down its length. I crept along behind him until we came to the remains of a steel bulkhead separating the compartments. It had been mostly torn away, but we still had to crouch down low to get through it.

  It was humid inside, and musty smelling. I slapped the flashlight on its side until its beam ran down the length of the plane.

  The back section was lined with a series of workstations, alcoves where I imagined soldiers performing their various duties. All that was left of them were welded-in steel shelves and short partitions. All the chairs, electronics, and wiring had been ripped out long ago by people like us. Vines crept up the walls and hung from the ceiling. Every so often some rusty metal lump emerged from underneath the plants, like the face of someone drowning.

  “Why would it have been going to Atlanta?” I asked, hoping to drive the eerie silence out of the air. Dad’s answer didn’t help.

  “P Eleven.”

  I shivered as he said it.

  “We tried to quarantine the big cities, but the people inside didn’t want to be cooped up with the sick, so the government decided to burn them out.”

  “They bombed their own people?”

  “Didn’t see any other choice, I guess. If it got out … ‘Course, in the end it didn’t matter. Got out anyway.”

  After that first spark the war escalated fast. It was only a few months before the United States launched some of its nukes at China and its allies. P11H3 was what China came back with. Everybody just called it P11 or the Eleventh Plague. It was nothing more than a souped-up strain of the flu, but it ate through the country like wildfire, infecting and then killing nearly everyone it touched. The last reliable news anyone heard before the stations went off the air said it had killed hundreds of millions in the United States alone.

  I cleared my throat to chase out the shakes. We had to stay focused on the task. The faster we got done, the faster we’d be on our way. “See anything worthwhile?” I called out.

  Dad appeared in the beam of my flashlight, blocking the light out of his eyes with his hand. “Looks like it’s been pretty picked over already. Let’s check farther back.”

  We rummaged through the rubble but only found the remains of some seats and a few crumbling logbooks. There were lockers along the walls but they were rusted shut or empty. Useless. It was as though we were wandering through the remains of a dinosaur, picking through its bones.

  “Last of its kind,” Dad said, patting the wall. “These things went into production right before the Collapse.”

  The Collapse followed in the wake of P11. With so few people left alive, everything just shut down. Factories. Hospitals. The government. The military crumbled. Power stations blew one by one until the electricity went out countrywide. It was like America had been wired up to one big switch and the Eleventh Plague was the hand that reached up and clicked it all off. Millions more must have died in the darkness and neglect that followed.

  “See anything?” Dad asked.

  I shook my head. “Nah. Let’s get out of here, okay?”

  “All right, all right.” Dad patted my shoulder as we started back for the bulkhead. “Hey, what’s that?”

  “What?”

  Dad knelt down by a metal locker at my feet. It was partially hidden under the overhang of one of the workstations, right by a small crack in the plane’s skin that let in a finger of sunlight. Dad pushed a cover of weeds and dirt out of the way.

  “It’s just an old locker,” I said. “If there was anything in it, someone would have taken it already.”

  “Maybe they didn’t see it. Come here and give me a hand.”

  I looked up through the bulkhead to the open air outside. We were so close. “It’s rusted shut. We’ll never get it open.”

  “We can’t get careless when it comes to salvage, Stephen,” Dad snapped. “Now come on. Pull on it when I do, okay? On three. One. Two. Pull!”

  We threw our backs into it and, surprising both of us, the lid screeched loudly and popped off, throwing us on our butts with a heavy thud.

  “Ha! See? Me and you, kid, we can do anything!” Dad pulled himself back up and leaned over the open locker, rubbing his palms together. “So, what’ve we got here?”

  At first glance it wasn’t much. Dad handed back a thick blue blanket that was worth keeping. There was a moment of excitement when he found stacks of prepackaged military rations, but they were torn up and past their prime. Worthless.

  “Okay. Can we go now?”

  “In a second. We —” Dad froze, his eyes going wide. “Oh my God.” I scrambled to join him. “What? What is it?” He reached deep into the locker and struggled with something I couldn’t see.

  “Dad?”

  His back flexed and he managed to lift whatever it was into the light.

  “What is —”

  It was a metal can. Not one of the little ones we used to find lining the shelves of abandoned grocery stores, but a big one. Forty-eight ounces at least. Dad turned it around so that the light shone on the label. It read, simply, in black letters: PEARS.

  “Fruit,” Dad said, his voice thick with awe. “Good Lord, it’s canned fruit. Jesus, how long has it been?”

  Two years at least. Dad had saved a can of pears for my thirteenth birthday. Since then if we had fruit, it was a runty crab apple or a nearly juiceless orange. My stomach cramped and my mouth watered at the memory of those pears and the sweet juice they sat in.

  Dad set the can down between us, then scrambled into his back pocket for the can opener. He was about to crack it open when my hand shot out and snatched his wrist.

  He looked up at me, his eyes looking almost crazed. “Steve —”

  “We can’t.”

  “What do you mean, we can’t?”

  “What would Casey give us for this?”

  “Stephen,” Dad laughed. “Look, I don’t know, but —”

  “We have nothing in that wagon out there. Could we get bullets? New clothes? Batteries for the flashlight?”

  “But …” Dad scrambled for a defense, but nothing came. His eyes dropped to the can opener, considering it a moment before his hand went limp and it clattered onto the floor.

  “I mean … we have to be smart,” I said. “Right?”

  Dad nodded once, looking exhausted.

  “You’re just like your grandfather,” he said.

  It hit me like a hammer in the chest. Before I knew what I was doing, I grabbed the can opener and stabbed its blade into the can, working it around. Dad tried to stop me, but before he could, I had the lid off and was tossing it aside. I dug my hand in and pulled out a fat slice of pear, holding it up into the narrow beam of light. It glistened like a jewel. Perfect and impossible.

  I paused, my heart pounding.

  “Go ahead,” Dad urged. “Take it.”

  The flesh of the pear snapped in my mouth when my teeth hit it. There was an explosion of juice, so much of it and so sweet. I chewed slowly, savoring it, then dug my hand in the can and shoved a slice at Dad before taking another for myself. We devoured them, all of them, grunting with pleasure. There was still some part of me, some tiny voice in the back of my head, screaming that it was wrong, but I kept stuffing pears into my mouth until the mean, raspy voice receded.

  We ate all the pears and split the juice inside, then we lay back, our bellies full and our mouths and hands sticky with sweet juice. Dad had this happy, dazed look on his face, and I was sure that he, like me, was replaying the moment over and over again in his head, committing the feel of the fr
uit in his mouth and its sweetness to memory.

  I lifted the empty can into the flashlight beam. Its dusty sides were splattered with congealing syrup. Stray pieces of flesh clung to the insides. Empty, it was as light as air. The dazed excitement of the pears began to fade, and some dark, clammy thing took its place, creeping through me. The sweetness of the pears turned bitter. My mouth ached. In an hour or two we’d be hungry again, the memory of the fruit would fade, and we’d still need clothes, bullets, batteries, and food. Winter would still be coming. I could hear Grandpa’s voice as clearly as if he was sitting right next to me. Stupid. Wasteful.

  I wished I could smash the can to pieces on the floor, tear it apart, the metal shards slicing up my hands as punishment for being so thoughtless.

  “Where are you going?”

  I had climbed out of the plane and was walking down to the end of one flower-covered wing. It had grown darker while we were inside. A curtain of dirty gray clouds blocked out the sun and there was a thick tingling in the air.

  “Stephen?”

  I picked one of the flowers off the wing’s edge and rolled it around in my hand. It left a purple smear of blood on my fingertips. “We should get moving,” I said.

  The rusty skin of the plane flexed as Dad leaned against it behind me.

  “You ever wonder what’s out there?” he asked.

  When I turned around, he had his hands stuffed in his pockets and was looking over his shoulder to the west, just as casual as you please. A small range of mountains hung over the woods, gray and misty-looking in the distance.

  “I always think maybe there’s, like, some quiet place. Somewhere you could build a little house. Hunt. Fish.” A dreamy grin drifted across his face. “Maybe even somewhere we could find other people like us.”

  I kicked at the dirt. “Find slavers maybe. Red Army. US Army. Bandits.”

  “We’ve stayed out of their way before.”

  I shot a sharp look across the space between us. Was he really talking about this? Leaving the trail? I tossed the flower into the grass and worked it into the ground with the toe of my boot.

  “We should get going,” I said, “and cover some more ground before dark.” I tried to push past him so I could gather Paolo, but Dad stopped me, his palm flat in the center of my chest. I looked straight across at him. Now that I was fifteen, I was nearly as tall as he was.

  “Listen, it’s just you and me now, Steve. Maybe this is our chance.”

  “Our chance for what?”

  “A life. A home.”

  Our nearly empty wagon and all the miles we still had to cover that day loomed just over Dad’s shoulder. I heard Grandpa’s voice, the ice-cold rasp of it, clear as day.

  “This is our home.”

  I knocked Dad’s hand off my chest and pushed past him, ducking back into the plane and through the bulkhead. My knees slammed into the dirt and rust, and I dug around for the flashlight and the can and its lid.

  A quiet place. A home. It was a fantasy, same as the helicopter. Dad knew that as well as I did, so why would he even bring it up? What was he thinking? First it was the ring, then the pears, and now this.

  I paused, feeling the bitterness of the words turning through my head. Was it true what he said? Was I like Grandpa? Part of me cringed at the thought, but who had kept us alive all these years?

  “Stephen!”

  What now? I hauled myself up and out of the plane to find Dad squinting off in the direction we’d come from. There was a puff of smoke rising into the air a few miles back.

  “What’s going —?”

  “Rifle,” he commanded. “Now!”

  I snatched the rifle off the wagon. Dad raised the scope to his eye and tracked it north across the horizon until he found what he was looking for.

  “People coming this way. With a vehicle.”

  He was trying to be calm, but I knew the hitch he got in his voice when he was scared. No announcement could possibly have been worse. One of Grandpa’s absolute, unbreakable rules was that if we saw other people, people we didn’t know, we were to avoid them at all costs. Other people meant trouble. Other people with a working vehicle meant even more trouble.

  “What do we do?” I asked, my heart pounding in my ears. “Run?”

  “We’re on foot. They’d be on us in a second.”

  “So what, then?”

  In answer, Dad grabbed Paolo by his reins and drew him around to the opposite side of the plane, out of sight. He tied his lead to a jutting piece of metal and told me to get our backpacks. I grabbed them and followed Dad into the plane.

  “All the way to the back,” he said, pushing us past the bomb bay and again through the bulkhead. We stumbled into the last of the stripped workstations and crouched down. We were hidden but still had a straight view through the bulkhead and to the rent in the plane ahead.

  “We’ll wait them out,” Dad said, stuffing our packs behind us. “They’ll probably do just what we did — look around and head on their way.”

  “But what if they don’t?”

  “They will,” he insisted.

  My chest seized with nerves. I knew he was only trying to make me feel better, but he was no surer than I was.

  I swallowed hard. “You’re right,” I said. “You’re right. They will. They’ll just go right on by.”

  But then it started to rain.

  THREE

  It came lightly at first, finger taps, barely noticeable, but within minutes it was a real storm. Rain slammed against the roof of the plane. Wind howled through it. We were crouched down behind the workstation, legs cramping and hearts pounding.

  “Maybe they rode by us,” I said.

  “Would you? In this?”

  There was a flash of lightning and thunder that made both of us jump, and the rain seemed to double in power in an instant. Back where we were a steady but light spray of water squeezed through the tiny cracks in the airframe, but it was a waterfall up by the opening. Water crashed down in a bright curtain and coursed down the floor of the plane, pooling at our feet and surrounding us in a cold, oily muck. I peeked over the edge of the partition, pushing a wet strand of hair out of my face. My eyes had adjusted to the dimness and I could see the entrance to the plane clearly. Nothing there.

  “It’s okay,” Dad said. “I think they really did go —” The waterfall split in two as the barrel of a black rifle pushed through and scanned the interior. I jerked back but Dad took my elbow, steadying me. We were about a hundred feet back and hidden. With the dark and the rain, it was a safe bet they couldn’t see or hear us. Still, my hands quaked as the rifle eased forward and two men came in behind it. One man held the rifle while the other followed with what I first thought were horse’s reins. As he stepped farther inside, I saw what was really at the other end.

  The reins ran from the man’s hand to cuffs around the wrists of a boy and a woman, and then up to thick collars on their necks. The two captives moved with the fearful slowness of people who expected to be beaten.

  “Slavers.” Dad spat it out, like the word itself was foul.

  If there was any group we avoided the most, it was them. Some were ex-military, some were just brutal scum. We saw them skulking around the edges of the trade gatherings like a bad disease. They mostly kept to themselves, but as far as we knew, they ranged throughout the country taking whoever they could and selling them to scattered militia groups, the few surviving plantation owners down south, or even the Chinese.

  The man with the reins pointed for them to go sit up against one wall, then tied the reins to the edge of the bomb bay. The woman and the boy never raised their heads to face him, never spoke, just shuffled to their places like broken animals. The slavers situated themselves in a dry spot in the bomb bay. One of the men pulled the cap off a flare and the entire plane exploded in a flash of red light. Dad and I ducked down behind the partition until the light lowered and we smelled the smoke of a small fire.

  It was still dark where we w
ere, so I took a chance and peeked around the edge of the partition. The men were gathered around their fire with a deck of cards and a bottle of liquor. Their clothes looked military to me. One was black with long dreadlocks and a thin beard. The other was white and immense, with bull-like shoulders and a jagged scar that ran from his temple down his cheek, disappearing at his jaw. It glowed pale in the firelight.

  Dad was up on his knees beside me. His eyes were narrowed and his lips were a tense line, but it wasn’t the slavers he was watching.

  The woman and the boy were illuminated by the ragged edge of the fire. It magnified the hollows of their eye sockets and the cruel thinness of their birdlike arms. The woman had scraggly hair and was wearing a short white dress that clung to her. She was so thin I could see the shadows of her ribs. The boy was smaller than me, barefoot, and wearing torn-up jeans and a filthy T-shirt. Across from them, the men drank and played cards, their laughter mixing with the driving rain and peals of thunder.

  Dad was holding the rifle just below the edge of the partition, gripping it so tightly his knuckles were white as bone. His finger was on the trigger.

  I grabbed his wrist. “We don’t get involved,” I whispered. “Grandpa said —”

  “Grandpa is gone,” he hissed.

  I glared down into the cold muck, my arms wound tightly around my chest. We needed to stay right there, still and quiet, until the rain passed and they were all gone. The woman. The boy. We didn’t know them. They weren’t our responsibility.

  Dad pulled the rifle back and huddled behind the partition with me. “I’m not saying we fight them,” he whispered. “They’re drinking. We give them time to get drunk and pass out. When they do, we untie the woman and boy on our way out and let them go. That’s all.”

  Dad’s hand fell on my shoulder, but I pushed it away.