The Eleventh Plague Read online

  The bald man, Marcus, looked around the bare walls of the crevasse. “String him up from what?”

  “Marcus —”

  “No one is getting strung up,” Marcus said sternly, which only enraged Will more.

  “He shot me!”

  “He grazed you, Will,” Sam said. “You were barely bleeding. You’re not even limping.”

  Will ignored him and kept after Marcus. “He’s a spy for Fort Leonard! They both are! When I get home, I’ll tell my father. I’ll tell everyone!”

  Marcus took a step closer to Will until their chests were almost touching. Marcus was actually an inch or so shorter, but he had shoulders like a buffalo and something deep and forceful in him.

  “Tell them anything you want, Will, but for right now, shut the hell up. You’re giving me a headache.”

  The black man laughed at that, a booming “Ha!” that caused Will to shoot him a deadly look before he sneered and, with a chuckle, shook his head in a snotty attempt at saving face. In the end he skulked away downstream, kicking a charred log from the fire with his bad leg. Marcus turned his back on Will and squatted down in front of me. I jerked away instinctively.

  Marcus held up his hands, palms out. “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t mean any harm. Will there’s daddy owns a lot of cattle and things. Sometimes he thinks that means he’s next in line to a throne we all keep trying to tell him doesn’t exist.”

  Marcus smiled, obviously trying to put me at ease, but I just stared at him, turning the rock around in my palm.

  “Looks like Sam gave you a hell of a knock there.”

  “Sorry,” Sam said in a deep Northern accent. He dropped his paw of a hand on the kid’s shoulder. “Couldn’t let you shoot Jackson here. We’ve just gotten to like him.”

  Jackson shrugged out from under the man’s hand, embarrassed. “Sam …”

  “What do you people want?” I asked.

  Marcus dropped his grin. “I’m Marcus Green,” he said, then pointed to the kid who stood shyly in the background. “That’s my son, Jackson. His highness there is Will Henry. Sam Turner’s the man who gave you that tap on the head.”

  “Howdy,” Sam said.

  Marcus looked back at Sam. Something passed between them that ended with Sam looking off after Will, then nodding. Marcus slipped a hunting knife from a sheath on his belt.

  I flinched backward, ready to swing the rock as best I could, but Marcus held his hands up again to steady me, then began sawing at the ropes around my wrists. I watched him carefully, even as the ropes popped open and he started on the ones at my feet.

  “That your dad?”

  Marcus waited, but I said nothing. Grandpa always said you should never tell anyone anything they didn’t need to know.

  “Well, whoever he is, he looks like he’s hurt pretty bad.”

  Marcus looked up at me as he worked, like he was taking my measure. He was trying to talk himself into something, and the fight was going back and forth. When the ropes snapped under his knife, he glanced back at Sam again. Sam hesitated, then gave a reluctant nod.

  “We can help you,” Marcus said under his breath. “We have a town. It’s not too far. My wife, Violet, is a doctor. Not one of those drunks running around claiming to be a doctor either — she’s the real thing. Army doctor before the Collapse. We could bring you both back to town with us and she could take a look at your dad.”

  He was lying, of course. If they had medicine, why would they waste it on some guy they didn’t even know? Still …

  “I don’t have anything to trade,” I said.

  “We’re not asking for anything,” Sam said. “Just offering our help.”

  I scanned their faces, searching for some sign of the deception I knew had to be there. But I wasn’t Grandpa; I didn’t have his eye. Whatever they wanted, whatever they were planning, I couldn’t see what it was.

  Not that it mattered. Small towns had begun to pop up in the last few years, but Grandpa had always kept us away from them. They were nothing but muddy collections of tumbledown shacks, he said, that stank of people living too close together and bred smallpox and dysentery. Besides that, they were targets for every slave trader, scavenger, or bandit around, like nails begging to be hammered down.

  “We just want to be left alone,” I said squarely to Marcus. “We can take care of ourselves.”

  “You sure?” Marcus asked.

  I nodded. Marcus signaled to Jackson and he stepped forward, his eyes on the ground in front of me. He handed Marcus a small cardboard box, then retreated to the stream’s edge.

  “Looked like you were about out,” Marcus said, handing me the box. “You take care of yourself now. Sorry for the trouble. We’re heading west if you change your mind.”

  They gathered up their things and turned to head downstream. Jackson lagged behind them, and for the first time that morning, he raised his eyes to meet mine. His were light blue and big and, like a doe’s, smart and skittish at the same time. He looked like he had something to say.

  “What?”

  Jackson shook his head. “Nothing. Sorry.” Then he turned and followed the others out of our camp.

  Only when they were out of sight did I reach for the cardboard box and open it up. Inside were four rows of five gleaming silver-jacketed bullets, set tip-down in a piece of white foam. I pulled one out and rolled the cold metal between my fingers. They were much newer than the ones we had, probably made right before the Collapse.

  Footsteps clicked against the rock, echoing down the walls of the gorge, growing softer each second. It wouldn’t be long until Dad and I were alone again.

  With Dad the way he was, I’d never be able to get us out of there. I closed the box of bullets and struggled to my feet, my head pounding.

  I knew that what I was doing was wrong. If Grandpa had been around, he’d have had a better answer, but he wasn’t. It was just me.

  “Marcus!” I called out as I ran down the shore. “Sam! Wait up!”

  PART TWO

  NINE

  We headed west for the rest of that day, tumbling through the yellow grass just below a heavily cratered highway. A thin sheet of clouds, like dirty cotton, was smeared across the sky.

  They had me wear a bandanna over my eyes all morning so I wouldn’t know the path they were taking, but they let me take it off by the time the sun was halfway into the sky. Not that it mattered much. I had never been so far west in my life and had no clue where I was.

  Marcus led the way with Jackson bringing up the rear. I was with Dad in their wood-slat wagon, sitting behind Sam and Will. Lying across from us was a buck Marcus said he’d shot earlier that morning. I tried not to look at it. Its stillness and empty, glasslike eyes caused something inside me to quake.

  I scanned the area around us for salvage, eager for something familiar, but there was nothing useful on the path, just blowing trash and a few distant billboards and road signs.

  I huddled down behind the front bench of the wagon and tended to Dad. He was lashed to a driftwood stretcher that Sam had improvised to get him out of the gorge. I raised his head into my lap and poured some water over his lips to wet them, careful that none of it went down his throat. I made sure Sam and Will were focused on the road, then took his arm in my hand and squeezed, praying that if some part of him was still awake he’d feel it and know I was there.

  Jackson had abandoned his position as rear guard and was trailing along behind the wagon, his rifle too big for him and cradled awkwardly in his hands.

  “You know, my mom’s real good,” he said. “Last year she fixed my friend Derrick’s broken arm.”

  He waited for a response, but I ignored him, turning my attention back to Dad. I was relieved when Jackson finally let the wagon pull away. I couldn’t seem to look at him without seeing his face framed in my scope the night before. The memory of my finger tensing on the trigger felt cold and dark inside me, like a stone at the bottom of a well.

  “Hey, look at that
!” Will called out, his golden hair fluttering in the wind. We were rolling past an island of gas stations and fast-food restaurants off the highway north of us. An Applebee’s sat in the center of it all like a faded king, its red, white, and green striped awning in tatters. A pack of dogs, razor thin and rabid, was in the parking lot, snarling as they fought over bits of trash. “Looks like some friends of yours!”

  “Will,” Sam warned.

  “No, seriously. Bet they even smell the same, like a mix of dead horse and an outhouse.”

  Will had raised holy hell when Marcus and Sam had told him I was coming, yelling about outsiders and spies and how I’d tell everyone where their town was.

  “Guess they don’t have bathtubs in Fort Leonard, huh, spy?”

  I gritted my teeth. I didn’t know what Fort Leonard was, or why he thought I was some sort of spy for them. I knew I should ignore him like I’d ignored Jackson, but I found my fingers curling around the handle of Dad’s knife instead.

  Will was about to start up again when the wagon slammed to a halt, tossing him back into his place at the front. “Ow! Sam!”

  “Oh gee, sorry, Will.”

  Sam turned and gave me a mischievous little grin as Will righted himself, cussing and spitting.

  Marcus came striding back from his place at the head of the group, wiping sweat off his bald head with his sleeve. I hid the knife under my coat before he could see.

  “It’s time,” Marcus said, and dropped a red bandanna on the wood rail at my shoulder — we must have been getting close. The whole thing seemed pretty ridiculous, but Marcus was nice enough about it, so I went along.

  As I was about to tie on the bandanna again, I caught Jackson staring at me. He held his rifle tight to his chest, his arms straining, his finger along the trigger guard. His face had gone stony. Confused, I followed his eyes down to my lap and saw that my coat had brushed open, exposing the weapon in my hand. Our eyes met before his darted away, but in that second I saw that he was afraid. I eased the knife back into its sheath before tying the blindfold around my eyes, feeling strangely satisfied to be the one causing fear instead of the one feeling it.

  The air grew steadily cooler and twilight settled around us. After a while, we came to a halt, and Sam and Will piled out of the wagon. There were shuffling footsteps and low voices up ahead, then the sound of something large brushing against the ground. I slipped the bandanna up over my eyes while their backs were turned and caught the four of them moving aside a group of small trees and brush to expose a rough path cutting into the woods ahead of us. Clever. I raced to pull the bandanna back down before they returned.

  It was colder and darker in the woods. We were surrounded on all sides by creaking branches and animal calls. It was another hour or more of bouncing travel before we moved out onto open ground, where we flew downhill before coming to a stop.

  There was a pause, then Sam loosened the knot of my blindfold so it fell to my shoulders.

  We were at the bottom of a grass-covered valley, surrounded on all sides by deep forest. Ahead of us was a white stone wall that cut across the entire valley like a bright line of snow, with a heavy double iron gate at its center. Two words were engraved in deep letters on the white wall: SETTLER’S LANDING.

  After Marcus opened the gates, Sam shook the reins and we rolled through. The gates made a rusty clank and then a deep final boom as they closed, hemming us in. A nervous flare bit through me. For a panicked moment, I wanted to leap out of the wagon and run. I took Dad’s arm tight in my fist.

  What have I gotten us into?

  On the other side of the gates, the grass turned into black asphalt, not at all the cracked, bomb-ravaged stuff most highways had become, but smooth and neat, snaking away down the hill. The horses’ hooves clicked as we followed it. The trees on either side of the road filtered the dying rays of sunlight so that they fell on us in shifting patterns of small shadows. It was achingly quiet. As we got farther in, I caught flashes of black and white and bright, unnatural colors peeking out through the trees.

  I was about to ask what they were but before the breath could leave my lungs the first house emerged from the trees. It was set back about a hundred feet from the road, two stories, with bright yellow on top and brick on the bottom, the whole thing circled by a wide porch the color of beach sand. Glass glittered in the window frames and there were brass fixtures on the doors and casements. In front of the house, a man in a sweater and jeans was raking up leaves from the lawn. He waved as we passed.

  “Better close your mouth before a bug flies in,” Sam said to me as he waved back.

  Will snickered. “It’s like the spy’s never seen a house before.”

  It was true. I hadn’t. Not like this anyway. Grandpa said that in the days of P11, people tried to escape the disease by barricading themselves in their homes, praying it would pass them by like an ill wind but it rarely worked. Somehow the plague always slipped in, under the doorways or through the windows like a mist, and killed them as they lay in their beds or sat at their dinner tables. Grandpa said that people used to think their home was their castle, but the Eleventh Plague made them all tombs. Every house I had ever known stank of rot, desperation, and fear. I didn’t go anywhere near them.

  But these … They were like a nest full of bird’s eggs, painted pale pink or blue or a green that was like the color of sun-bleached moss. Some even flew crisp-looking flags from their porches that fluttered and snapped in the breeze. I tried to find some flaw, some sign that this place had been through the same history that the rest of the country had, but I found, unbelievably, nothing. Part of me wondered if I was actually still lying with Dad at the bottom of that gorge, starved and delirious, imagining all of it.

  “You all right back there, son?” Sam asked.

  I nodded dumbly as he turned the wagon onto a side road where a green and white street sign said SETTLER’S LANDING TERRACE. The road led downhill to a two-pronged fork. Where the roads diverged was an open area like a park. It was grassy, with a few trees and low bushes scattered here and there. In the center were two large swing sets, a slide, and a big jungle gym made of multicolored lengths of steel tubing.

  Sam pulled on the reins and brought the wagon to a halt in front of a white house north of the park. He looked around at the other houses and cleared his throat — nervously, I thought. Sam had agreed to bring me here, but he was worried about it, not as sure as Marcus that it was a good idea. It made me wonder again what I had gotten myself into.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here we are.”

  As soon as we stopped, Will jumped off the bench and leaned over the side of the wagon. “Don’t get too comfortable, spy,” he hissed. “They may be fooled, but I’m not. This is our town. I’ll make sure you’re not here long.” He laughed, a self-satisfied little chuckle, then took off down the road.

  “Will, you should let Violet look at that leg,” Sam called, but Will didn’t even turn back. His grievously wounded leg seemed to be causing him no trouble at all. Sam shook his head. “You ready?”

  Sam offered me his hand but I ignored it and dropped onto the asphalt. Marcus had gone ahead into the house, so Sam and I lifted Dad out of the wagon before Jackson led the horses away. Dread settled over me as I followed Sam up the white house’s stairs. The door seemed like a great set of jaws, ready to swallow me whole.

  “You okay?” Sam asked.

  “Fine,” I said, sucking back the fear so he wouldn’t see. “Let’s go.”

  I held my breath as we stepped inside. I had never seen anything like the room we were in. It had clean white walls, a brick fireplace with an only slightly cracked marble mantel, and scuffed wood floors. All of it was lit with candles and small oil lamps that cast a dim amber glow. It smelled of sweet wood smoke and somewhere, faintly, what I thought was baking bread.

  “Set him here.”

  Sam pointed to a cot just under a window beside the front door. We got Dad off the pallet and onto it just as Marcus hu
rried into the room from another part of the house, a small woman with curly black hair following him.

  “This is Violet,” Marcus said.

  The woman pushed through us, snapping on a pair of latex gloves as she came. “What happened?” Her voice was sharp and flat as a shot.

  “He fell,” I said.

  Violet dropped down by Dad’s side. “How far?” When I didn’t answer, she turned back. “How far?”

  “I don’t know. Ten, twenty feet? He was in the water and hit his head.”

  Violet gently slid her fingers behind Dad’s head and closed her eyes, concentrating. “More like thirty feet, I think. He lost consciousness immediately?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  Violet went to a wooden cabinet along the wall and pulled open one of about ten narrow drawers. Inside I saw rows of small glass bottles with white labels. Gleaming silver instruments lay beside them. I tried to get a better look, but Violet selected a few instruments, then snapped the drawer closed and came back to Dad’s side.

  She worked quietly, listening to Dad’s heart, checking his temperature, pulling back his eyelids to stare into his eyes. Her movements were quick and precise but never rushed, as though she was moving methodically through some checklist in her head. Even when she unwrapped his head and the blood began to flow again, she didn’t panic. Instead, she grabbed some clean bandages and went to work.

  I couldn’t watch. The way she poked and prodded at him made me feel sick and hot. I turned away; outside the window, I could see a group gathering in the park, a small assembly of women and children in old jeans and flannels. Some were tending the beginnings of a bonfire, while others set a collection of torches into the ground and opened up a large plastic folding table.

  “It’s Thanksgiving.”

  I turned to Marcus and Sam, standing behind me. “What?”

  “Today,” Marcus said. “At least we think it is. Anyway, that’s what we got the deer for. Couldn’t find a turkey. We’re putting together a barbecue tonight out in the park. Why don’t we all go? Violet will come get us when she’s done.”