The Eleventh Plague (14 page)

Minutes later I was running through the woods behind Jenny. There was no path I could see, so I had to struggle to keep an eye on her as she ran, slick as a deer, in and out of the pools of moonlight that littered the forest floor.

She knew the woods better than I did and made a game out of staying ahead of me so that I could follow but never quite catch up. It wasn’t until we both had to slow down to scale the Settler’s Landing fence that I got anywhere near her. She dropped down into a crouch just behind a thick stand of trees. When I came up, Jenny put her finger to her lips and motioned for me to get down. Both of us were breathing heavily, pushing out thick plumes of white steam.

“Where are we?” I whispered.

Jenny motioned forward with her chin. “Take a look.”

In the clearing ahead was a house totally unlike all the others in Settler’s Landing. It was enormous, more of a mansion than a house, with towering white walls and columns flanking the front door like marble generals. Two windows in the upper stories glowed with yellow light and filled the yard with a flickering glow.

“Casa de Henry,” Jenny said. “What are we doing here?”

Just then the lights in the upper windows went out. “Come on. We have to go around back.”

Jenny took off deeper into the woods, heading to the rear of the house. As we moved around it, its size became even more overwhelming. The walls stretched back another hundred feet or so.

Behind the house there was a collection of fenced enclosures that looked recently built, homemade from scrap pieces of wood, split logs, and scavenged chicken wire. One held chickens, another pigs, and a third sheep.

“The horses and about twenty cows, mean suckers, are in different enclosures on the other side of the trees, but this’ll do,” Jenny told me.

“Do for what?”

Jenny wasn’t listening. She had started to dig around in her bag. “Take these.” She dropped a handful of the fused cylinders into my hand.

“You want me to blow up the sheep?”

Jenny slapped me on the side of the head. “No! We’re not gonna hurt them.”

“But —”

“Look, the word
explosive,
when applied to these things, is a little grand. They’re more like firecrackers.”

“Jenny, I don’t know. If we get caught —”

“What? We already tossed
ourselves
out of town. Right? Look, I swear to you, they’ll never know it’s us. Besides, what we are about to do is incredibly obnoxious but more or less harmless.”

“What
are
we about to do?”

She smiled a razory smile. “We are going to make sure Will Henry has a really, really crappy night. Now go around to the sheep pen, open the gates, and toss them in. Oh! Matches.”

Jenny shoved a cardboard box of matches in my hand and darted out from behind the tree to a spot between the pig and chicken enclosures. I made my way to the sheep’s pen, one eye always on the house in case a light came on. I ducked down by the gate. Most of the sheep were in a knot at the center of their pen and didn’t even raise their heads as I approached. I slipped the rope loop that held the gate closed up over a post. There was a sharp squeak from the hinge as I opened it that made my heart freeze. One sheep raised its head with mild curiosity but then lowered it again.

I shuffled the bundle of firecrackers in my palm. It was crazy. Utterly crazy. I peeked over the fence. Jenny was poised at the pig pen, firecrackers in hand. I swallowed hard and turned back to the sheep standing placidly in the mud. I saw Will Henry pushing Jenny to the ground. I saw his gold hair and his vicious smile.

I lit the fuse as Jenny struck hers, then tossed my bundle about five feet behind the biggest knot of sheep. One turned back toward the sparking pile of firecrackers.

“Baaaaa.”

The explosions were so much bigger than I thought they’d be — a fast procession of booms, sizzles, and cracks, followed by great showers of sparks, red and green and yellow, shooting up into the sky and exploding again, creating umbrellas of fire that lit up the yard like a new sun.

“Cool!” Jenny exclaimed as she slid into the dirt next to me. “I had no idea they were going to do
that.”

The animals completely lost their minds. I had never heard anything like it — the clucking, the oinking, the … whatever it is that sheep do was deafening. In seconds they were on the move, pouring out of the gates of their pens. Most of them headed right for the Henrys’ huge and beautiful home. Candles flared throughout the house and I could imagine what was going on inside: a confused jumble of Henrys shouting over the squeals of the animals, trying to get dressed, reaching for guns.

“Um, Jenny, I think we better get out of here.”

Just then the back door opened and Will came running out in his underwear, a shotgun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He was joined by a mix of relations, a group of much older brothers and a small girl with blond hair I guessed was his sister.

The animals made right for them, a tidal wave of flesh that curled around their legs, knocked them off balance, then scattered out in all directions. The smaller ones leapt onto the fine white porch and covered everything with a layer of mud and panicked excrement. A few even made it through the back door and into the house, eliciting a chorus of screams and smashing pots and pans. But the bulk of the animals tore right into the woods, crushing through the brush and disappearing. Caleb emerged from the house and shouted at the others to get after them. Will tried to comply but right then a particularly terrified sheep knocked him into the mud.

“Yes!” Jenny said. “Mission accomplished!”

“Hey! Who’s there?!”

The beam of a big flashlight was coming Jenny’s way. It would hit her any second.

I leapt up out of the brush. “Bow down to your new masters!” I yelled. “Fort Leonard forever!”

The flashlight jerked away and we took off into the woods, laughing just as a shotgun exploded behind us. We ran flat out, leaping over streams and dodging walls of thornbushes, pausing only long enough to fling ourselves up over the fence before racing on again. Even when the sounds of the stampeding livestock and the panicked Henrys were lost in the thicket behind us we kept running. Jenny was ahead of me when the barn appeared in front of us.

As we crossed the clearing, I gave a burst of speed and was right at her heels. I grabbed hold of her arm and tried to pull her back, but our momentum sent us both careening into the wall, landing hard enough to make the whole barn shudder. Jenny hit first and I piled into her, trapping her with my arms. She twisted around so her back was pressed up against the wall.

“I still won,” she panted.

Her cheeks were bright red from the cold and slashed with strands of black hair.

The next thing I knew, we were kissing. I don’t know if she started it or I did. My elbows collapsed, making a cage around her, pressing our bodies together so that when we fought for air our chests crashed together.

Her hands clasped around my back, pulling me in tight. My hand found her hip, then rose up until it touched the smooth fault line of her scar.

Her skin felt like it was on fire beneath my fingertips.

When I woke it was barely light out and freezing. Winter had finally arrived. Even in my sweater, flannel shirt, and jeans, I shivered as I pushed myself up on my elbows. Jenny was sitting on the floor of the barn, dressed in jeans and a black sweater, scribbling away on her sketch pad. “Aren’t you cold?”

She shrugged, focused on the paper in her lap, sketching, frowning, erasing, and starting over again. In the sunlight her black eye from the day before looked even worse, an oil slick spread of blue, black, and gray. I turned on my side and watched her, pulling the blanket up over my shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

“Drawing,” she said without looking up.

“What?”

“You.”

“Think you could make me taller?”

Jenny smiled. I turned on my back and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes.

“What do you do them for? The drawings. Do you sell them or trade them or something?”

“Oh yeah, I supply the entire town with moody line drawings.”

“Seriously.”

“I don’t know. Violet found this set of drawing pencils somewhere and gave them to me. Everything seems a little quieter when I draw. Nothing else manages it. If I didn’t, I think a lot more people around here would be sporting black eyes.”

I looked up and traced the dusty lines of the timbers stretching across the ceiling, wishing I had something like that, something that would still the nameless feeling that was growing inside of me like a storm cloud, like something just barely forgotten.

Dad.

It was the first night of my entire life that I had spent apart from him.
And for what?
I thought bitterly, memories of the night before swarming in.
So I could run around having fun while he lay there alone in that house? What if our little prank made things even worse?

I closed my eyes and saw a glint of gold shining in the dark. My grandfather’s fist falling from the sky. Alive or dead, he was still there. His voice still in my ear. Our survival was all on me — and what was I doing about it?

I drew myself up out of the bed.

“What are you doing?” Jenny asked as I slipped one boot on and hunted for the other. “Uh, hello? Question here.”

“I should be out looking for supplies,” I said. “Making camp somewhere.”

“Funny, it seemed like you were making camp here.”

My fingers froze on the strap of my backpack. I stood there stupidly, unable to move. It was like all the bones had tumbled out of my body.
How could I make her understand?

“Talk to me, Stephen,” Jenny said quietly. She was looking up at me over the edge of her pad. Her eyes, liquid and sharp at the same time. It was like she was always one step ahead of me. Grandpa had told me a hundred times to keep quiet. To keep things to myself. But I couldn’t anymore.

“I just … I keep thinking I’m going to be …”

“What?”

A white star, crowned in gold, fell, and I shook from its impact. “… punished,” I said.

“For what? Having fun? Being with me? Why would you think that?”

Jenny’s pencil clattered to the floor as she charged across the room and knocked me back onto the bed. She threw her legs over my chest, holding me down.

“Jenny …”

She took both my wrists in her calloused hands, pinning me. Her hair fell down around us like a curtain, blocking out the rest of the world.

“No one is going to be punished for something as dumb as stampeding some pigs or wrestling with me. Not by God, not by anybody.”

“Jenny, let me up.”

“The world is not all on you,” Jenny said, pushing me down, suddenly fierce. “I know it feels that way, but it’s not. Not anymore.” She dipped her head down and kissed me. “Not for either of us. Okay? Now say that the world isn’t going to end if Little Stevie Quinn has some fun.”

“Jenny —”

“Say it! I mean, you did have fun blowing things up and kissing me last night, right?”

Fun wasn’t the word. Not even close. Suddenly Grandpa and that flash of gold seemed far away.

“Say it,” Jenny repeated, a whisper, her face inches from mine. “The world isn’t going to end.”

I watched her lips move and matched them carefully, syllable for syllable. Something about it felt secret and shameful, but I said it anyway.

“The world isn’t going to end.”

Jenny’s lips fell onto mine, and then we lay there gazing dreamily up at the high ceiling for I don’t know how long. One of us would laugh and then the other, for no reason we could put a name to. Thoughts entered my mind and I said them and they all seemed to make sense to her.

The sun mounted steadily outside, filling the barn with an amber light.

“What time do you think it is?” I asked.

“Are you saying time doesn’t cease to have meaning when we’re together?”

“Seriously.”

“I don’t know,” she said sleepily. “A little after dawn, I guess? Why?”

I turned so our faces were just inches apart on separate pillows. “I want to go back over to the Greens’ for a second. Before everyone gets up.”

“For what?”

“To see Dad. And get some books.”

“Books?”

I paused. I had said it without thinking. I knew the mocking that I was in for, but what could I do? “Some, uh, books Tuttle gave me.”

Jenny chuckled. “He totally got to you with the save the world thing, didn’t he?”

“He did not!”

“He did! You’re going to help usher in a new golden age of mankind.”

“I am not!” I said, and then, when her laughter had faded, “I don’t know. I was mad when I left, so I didn’t take them. But now I guess … I’ve just never had anything like that before. School and stuff, I mean. It’s kind of cool knowing things other than how to avoid dying.”

“No, I get that,” she said, then added with a smirk, “you’re coming back though, right? This isn’t some clever little ploy?”

I laughed, struck for a second by the strange sound of it and how easy it felt when I was with her. Once I got myself together I stood there at the edge of the bed, hands stuffed in my pockets.

How does this work? Do I kiss her before I leave?

Over and over again I was falling into worlds I didn’t know the rules for.

“So … I’ll, uh, see ya later.”

Jenny rolled her eyes at my awkwardness. I took a last look at her lying there in the half-light, then turned toward the door, knowing that if I didn’t leave right away, I never would.

“I want to come with you when you go.”

I stopped in my tracks inches from the door.

“When your dad is better,” she said. “I want to come. I was going to be all subtle about it. At one point I was even going to blackmail you, since I spied on you burying all that stuff of Violet’s that night, but now I thought I’d just come out with it.”

Jenny rose up out of bed and moved toward me.

“Look, like you saw last night, I’m kind of a tactical genius, right? And I know where all the good stuff in this town is, so I could help you pick up some salvage before we go. What do you think?”

Jenny’s face was inches from mine, but I was too stunned to say anything.

“You don’t want me to,” she said flatly. “It’s not that.”

“What? You don’t think I can handle it?” Jenny teased. “I could destroy you in a heartbeat.”

“I know.”

“Don’t worry, Stephen — it’s not like I’m asking you to marry me or anything.”

“No, I didn’t — I just mean …” I struggled, trying to come up with a reason her offer was so confusing. “Why would you
want
to?”

“Why? Because I can’t live in this stupid twentieth-century museum anymore. I don’t belong here, and neither do you! I want to be out there in the real world. With you.”

“Jenny, it’s not —”

“What? Easy? Safe? Uh, yeah, no kidding. We were out there for ten years before we came here and we saw all the same things you did. Worse, maybe.”

I thought of that morning by the stream. She and Jackson playing cards and all the blood that followed. Who was I to tell her what the real world was?

“I know it will be dangerous,” she said. “I just think sitting here in this barn playing dumb pranks isn’t living. With or without you, I’m leaving. I’d rather it be with you. And I think that’s what you want too.”

She was right. I knew it as soon as she suggested it. I knew exactly what Grandpa would think, what he would say, but right then I didn’t care. The idea of walking out of town without her seemed impossible.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Ha!” she exclaimed. “Nice! It’ll be great, you’ll see. And your dad is totally gonna love me. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah, I kind of have a feeling he might.”

Jenny popped up on her toes and kissed me again, holding it longer this time, slipping her arms around my back so our bodies pressed tight together. “Still want to go get those books?”

I smiled. Our foreheads met, making a close little pyramid. “Yep.”

“Jerk.”

“I’ll come back as soon as I get them.”

By the time I got to the door, Jenny already had her sketch pad in her hands, drawing, lost in it. Her dark hair was a tangled mess, and in the growing light of the morning, her skin glowed. Her sweater slipped away from her shoulder, revealing a tiny island chain of freckles. I watched her for a second and then slipped out the door into the cold morning air.

I stood for a moment in the barnyard, then made for a path that cut like an arrow into the woods. Everything seemed golden and crisp around me and I felt I was close to touching something I had never seen, or even hoped for. The future.