The Eleventh Plague (18 page)

“Stephen?” Jenny whispered.

She grabbed my arm and pulled me deeper into the forest, away from the camp. Once we couldn’t hear them anymore, we eased down the back side of a slope, pressing our backs into the snow.

“We’ll tell Marcus,” Jenny said. “Warn them. Maybe if they know what’s coming —”

I almost laughed. The thought that they had a chance against these people, that they could even risk that, was ridiculous.

“They’ll have to go,” I said. “All of them. Take what they can and leave.”

“Leave Settler’s Landing? They won’t. Marcus and Violet? They’d die first.”

My fists curled in on themselves. She was right. God, what had I started? Were they here because of me too? Had they come looking for me and Dad and found Fort Leonard instead?

We sat there, a moat of empty space between us. Jenny chewed on her thumbnail, staring at the ground. We both knew what was coming.

I had seen it in the belly of that plane and she had seen it in a mass of men with their guns and their wild, hungry looks.

“It’s not our fault,” Jenny said. “What we did was stupid, but it was Caleb who went to Fort Leonard. Not us.
He
started this.”

I murmured something in agreement, but I didn’t believe it and I knew Jenny didn’t either.

A light snow began to fall again, whipping through the trees and tapping against our shoulders. A laugh, loud and throaty, rose from the slave traders’ camp. It was like the grunting of an animal ready to hunt.

I took Jenny’s hand and we fled through the woods.

Violet and Marcus were at the kitchen table when we arrived. Violet was at one end, knitting distractedly, while Marcus leaned grimly over a mug of tea.

“What is it?” Violet asked.

Before I could speak, Jackson came thundering down the stairs. I felt a flash of happiness to see him again but as soon as he saw me and Jenny, he stopped where he was, grasping the rail and eyeing us sharply.

“What are they doing here?”

The way he spat it out, I knew instantly that Marcus told him everything about our raid on the Henrys’. How we had started all of this. My mouth went dry. I felt sick. Ashamed.

“Come sit down, Jackson,” Violet said. “Stephen and Jenny say they have something to tell us.”

Jackson crept down the stairs, then took a seat at the far end of the kitchen table. He didn’t look at me and I found I couldn’t look at any of
them. How could I? I’d abandoned Jackson, stolen from Violet, and betrayed Marcus and everyone else in the town. “Well, Stephen?” Violet said.

They all sat there watching us. Waiting. I clasped Jenny’s hand under the table and told them about the slavers that Fort Leonard had hired. The jeeps. The weapons. That they were the same ones my Dad and I had fought. Everything.

When I was done, Marcus rubbed his hand over the thick collection of stubble on his chin.

“Slavers,” Marcus said carefully. “You’re sure?”

I nodded. “I’m sure.”

Marcus looked across the table at Violet, but she stared down into her lap, all the color drained from her face.

“I know you don’t want to leave,” I said. “But you don’t know what these people will do. They —”

“They won’t do anything,” Jenny interrupted.

I turned to where Jenny sat beside me.

“What do you mean? Of course they —”

But Jenny wasn’t looking at me. She was focused on her parents. Her parents, who wouldn’t meet her gaze.

“Will they?” Jenny asked, holding the words out like bait. Marcus and Violet said nothing. Jackson didn’t move.

“I don’t …”

And then I got it. I saw what Jenny saw.

Ever since the night of our raid on the Henrys’, they should have been expecting the forces of Fort Leonard to arrive at any moment. But if they did, then why was Violet sitting at the table knitting? Shouldn’t she have been preparing for the coming fight? Shouldn’t Marcus’s rifle be close at hand instead of sitting in its rack on the wall?

And when I told them that a small army of slave traders was bearing down on them, they didn’t seem scared. They didn’t pack up. They didn’t flee town.

Most of all, they didn’t seem surprised.

I felt something like a barbed hook sinking into my gut and in that instant I knew.

Fort Leonard didn’t hire the slavers.

They did.

“Caleb told us they were mercenaries,” Marcus said, looking down into his tea. “Ex-soldiers. I don’t know where he found them. He said they’d run the people at Fort Leonard off so they wouldn’t come back. That’s all. He said no one would get hurt.”

“What are you supposed to do for them?” Jenny asked.

“They want to expand west. Caleb said we’d be like a way station. Nothing more. They’d store fuel here, food. He didn’t tell us they were slavers, I swear.”

“When does it happen?”

“Tonight. Sundown. We’re supposed to meet them at the gates and then we all go together.”

“We have to talk to Caleb,” Violet said. “Now.”

Marcus looked up at her. “And say what? You don’t think Caleb and his friends know what these people are already?”

“Then we talk to everyone else. Sam, Tuttle — we’ll have a vote.”

“You think if we have a vote and we actually win, they’ll just leave?”

We all sat there, still as statues as it sunk in. Slavers were no different from starving animals. Deny them Fort Leonard and they’d eat Settler’s Landing just as happily.

“Then what?” Violet asked.

Marcus turned to face the swirl of white outside. It was mounting steadily on the porch and bending the trees until their branches hung down miserably, nearly ready to snap.

“We did well this year, but you know the winters as well as I do, Vi. We’ll lose at least ten people from the cold and lack of food alone. If we have to deal with Fort Leonard picking away at us too, we could be done for. Our home. All of us. Gone.”

“What are you saying? We let this happen? Marcus —”

“I’m saying we don’t have a choice, Vi.”

“We do,” Violet said. “We have a choice about what we become, Marcus. Maybe it’s the only thing we
do
have a choice about.”

“Do you want to be out there again? Us and not them? Is that what you want?”

“How many times have we come close to doing the right thing,” Violet asked, “and then stopped because we were afraid? This. Sean and Mary Krychek —”

“Violet.”

“— that girl of theirs, just nine years old?”

“We did the best we could for them.”

“We stood up for them for an hour before giving them an old blanket and a day’s worth of bread and sending them on their way! Because we were afraid!”

Violet was red with anger and shame, leaning up out of her chair, her nails digging into the table. Marcus had no answer for her.

The wind howled and the snow mixed with hail that sounded sharp and metallic, like fingers tapping on a tin roof.

“You remember that day we played Go Fish, Jenny?”

Everyone turned to Jackson. His back was to us, caught in the
half-gloom at the edge of the kitchen, looking out past the marble-topped counter to the storm outside. “Yeah,” Jenny said. “I do.”

“Everyone in Fort Leonard is just waking up,” Jackson said, almost to himself, the words tumbling out. “They’re talking. Starting fires for breakfast. Wishing it wasn’t snowing. But then these people, us, will appear and some of them won’t live through the day. Some of them have maybe a few hours left until they’re gone, or their families are gone and they’re alone. And they have no idea it’s coming. They think it’s just another day.”

Jackson’s voice hitched in his throat. A redness crept into his cheeks like leaves of flame.

“Jack,” Marcus urged. “Listen to me. I don’t like it either, but it’s us or it’s them. It’s —”

Jackson turned from the window and faced Marcus head-on, searching his face. Marcus deflated. He dropped his head, looking down at his hands. They seemed so small now, framed against the hardness of the table.

Violet moved over to Jackson, wrapping her arms tight around him from behind.

“I’m afraid too,” Violet said to Marcus. “But if fear’s all we’ve got, then we’re building this world on the same rotten foundation as the last one. What good are we doing Jackson or Jenny or Stephen? What good are we doing anyone?”

Marcus turned and regarded each of us one by one, like we were a jury deciding his fate, before struggling up out of his chair and gathering his rifle and his coat.

I stood up at the table. “No,” I said, urgently. “You can’t fight them. If you try to be a hero —”

“Caleb lied to us,” Marcus said. “And he did it so he could turn this place into something none of us want it to be. This is our home. If this isn’t worth fighting for, then what is?”

Jackson left his mother and crossed the room to stand with Marcus. Together they went out into the front room. A moment later, the door shut with a deep
boom
that shuddered through the house.

No one moved for a time. The wind moaned. The finger-tap hail pattered on and on.

Violet went without another word to her cabinet. She lit candles and then opened each drawer one by one, taking inventory with crisp practiced motions, preparing for whatever was to come.

Beside me, Jenny sat with her chin resting on her fists, absorbed in the whirl of white. I pushed away from the table and went out the front door.

A rush of wind and snow blew toward me as I stepped outside and dropped down onto the front steps. Across the street, Marcus and Jackson moved from one house to the other. They’d disappear inside for a time, and when they came out they’d be joined by one or two others and they’d all move on, snaking their way through the town.

With their dark coats cutting through the snow, they reminded me of an army of black ants gathering to make a valiant stand against a farmer’s boot.

Behind me, the front door opened and closed. Jenny descended the steps and went to stand beyond the porch’s roof, looking from house to house, taking it all in.

“You’re staying,” I said. “Aren’t you?”

Jenny lifted her chin, examining the cottony sky. “I thought I could leave,” she said. “I thought it’d be easy. But I can’t. Not if they don’t.”

Everything in me ached. Of course Jenny would stay. She’d join with whoever Marcus could raise to fight Caleb and the slavers, and they’d all suffer.

And what could I do? Only one thing.

“I should get our things,” I said, looking down at the brick steps beneath my feet. “From the casino. Before anything starts.”

“Want me to come?”

I turned back to face her. Jenny stood on the porch with her hands jammed in the pockets of her coat, her hair a cloud of black. She was looking over my head, scanning the neighborhood, her eyes focused to a knife’s edge. There was no stopping her.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll do it myself.”

Jenny darted in and kissed my cheek. “Hurry up. It’d be a shame if the cold killed you before the slavers had a chance.”

I nodded and Jenny threw open the front door and went inside. I stood there a moment looking at the blank face of the door, listening to the falling snow, before I crossed the Greens’ front yard and went out into the street.

The walls to either side of the Settler’s Landing gates had never seemed more like two gravestones as I passed them and went into the forest. Looking out over the crumbling highway and the casino, everything seemed so far away. Jenny. Jackson. All of my friends. I wished the chain that bound me to them could be cut, but it was there, strong as ever.

I bypassed the casino and trekked some miles until I found the clearing where I’d buried Dad. In the center there was a swell in the blanket of white. My hands stung as I knelt in front of it and scooped the piles of snow away until I reached the loose dirt at the top of the
grave. I pressed my palms deep into it. My breath dropped to a whisper. A yawning emptiness opened inside me.

I’m here,
I thought.
I’m right here.

I used Dad’s knife to cut a thick branch down from one of the surrounding trees, stripped it of its bark, and flattened one side. I held it in my lap and carved the letters of his name before plunging it deep into the ground at the head of his grave. When I was done, I traced my fingers over its surface.

STEPHEN
R.
QUINN.

I thought of Grandpa lying out alone in the woods so far away. If we had left a marker for him, it would have said the exact same thing. And soon so would mine.

I started to speak, to say good-bye, but it was like my mouth was stuffed with dead leaves and sand.

The wind rose, carrying the scent of pine and earth, and for a second I felt Jenny’s lips, soft and warm, against my cheek. She lingered there, her forehead at my temple, her breath on my neck. I had to shake her ghost away.

I drew my knife and tested its dark edge with my thumb. Though its surface was pitted and scarred and worn with age, it was still sharp. It killed me to lie to Jenny, but I knew that what I had to do, I had to do alone.

I slipped into the trees as quietly as I could, staying low and in the shadows. I had to stay hidden for as long as possible.

The snow had stopped and the day had grown warmer, leaving slippery patches of ice and snow and mud. As I drew closer to the slavers’ camp, I caught metallic clanking noises and snatches of voices, faint at first. Despite the cold, sweat was dripping off my forehead. When I slid Dad’s knife from its sheath, my palms were slick on the handle. A heavy thump shuddered through my chest.

I closed my eyes and was once again cowering in the back of that plane, choked with the musty smell of dank water and the tangles of weeds and dirt all around us.

I wiped my hands off on my jeans and stood up, surveying the last stretch of woods between me and the slave traders’ camp. I gripped the blade tight and began to step over a fallen tree, but a pair of hands grabbed me from behind and yanked me backward. I struggled to get away but my knees hit a stump and I toppled over it. The knife shot out from my hand. I thought of Jenny and the Greens. I couldn’t lose like this, not when I was so close. I tried to get myself up again, but before I could, my attacker vaulted over and pinned
me down. A face framed with long wisps of black hair darted down toward mine.

“Jenny?”

She put her fingers to her lips, then dragged me away, farther from the slavers’ camp. We stopped on the other side of a fallen tree and she dropped down in front of me.

“What are you doing here?” I hissed.

“What am I doing here? Following you, that’s what I’m doing. Man, I’ve known you for, like, a week and I can already see right through you. ‘Going to get our things from the casino.’ Yeah, right. Why didn’t you tell me you had a plan?”

“There is no plan,” I said, picking Dad’s knife up out of the snow.

“Go back to town.”

“Oh sure. I’ll let you waltz into camp and stab their two psycho leaders on your own. I’m sure that’ll work out just great. Are you insane? This was your plan? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“ ‘Cause I didn’t want you to follow me! Look, just go home. I don’t want you involved in this. This isn’t your problem. Let me —”

“That isn’t how this works, Stephen.”

“How what works?”

Jenny stared at me.

“Us,” she said. “If you’re going to do something stupid, then so am I.”

My hands went weak on the handle of the knife. “Jenny —”

“Marcus gathered about forty others,” Jenny said in a hush. “They’re meeting Caleb and the slavers at the gates at sunset. If they can’t call it off, they’ll fight. I figure the best we can do is slow them down, hobble them a little to give Marcus a chance. Without those jeeps, things would be a little more even. Right?”

I wanted to argue but she was that hurricane again, ready to tear through whatever was in her way. How do you fight a force of nature? “Right,” I said. “But how —”

An explosion of light came from the direction of the camp, piercing the gloom with razor-thin fingers. Jenny and I fell flat in the snow. We glanced at each other, then Jenny crept forward before I could stop her. I scrambled along behind, and together we peeked over the edge of the fallen tree.

The jeeps’ headlights washed over the camp, throwing the shadows of the slavers onto the trees. Their engines roared. The men were making final preparations, fueling the jeeps, strapping on their gear, and checking their weapons.

There were at least twenty of them. With just the two of us and practically no weapons, I didn’t see any option for us that didn’t look like suicide. I was about to tell Jenny it was impossible, but before I could, she nodded out to our left where a lone backpack sat by the side of a tent.

At first I didn’t see why, but then I looked closer. Hanging from the side of the pack was a string of black baseball-size orbs with pins sticking out of them. Grenades. One of the men must have set them aside, meaning to grab them on the way out. I looked across the camp. The pack was a good ten feet from where the slavers were gathering for their instructions, but at least forty feet from where Jenny and I were.

“We’ll never get to them before they get us.”

Jenny was silent, chewing on it. She kept her eyes fixed on the camp. The man with the scar climbed into the driver’s side of one of the jeeps just as it was finished being fueled.

“This isn’t going to work,” I said. “We should just —” Jenny pulled off her heavy coat, revealing her old Red Army jacket beneath. She started buttoning it up. “What are you —?”

“I’m taking care of the first part.” Jenny pulled her hair back tight and secured it with a leather thong she took from her pocket. “Second part’s on you.”

“Jenn —”

Before I could finish, Jenny kissed me quick, stepped out from behind the tree, and walked right into the middle of the slavers’ camp.