The Eleventh Plague (21 page)

Jenny pulled at my hand and we all raced into the crowd that was gathering in the park between Sam’s house and the Greens’. Others flooded in behind us, returning from the fight only to find their homes close to destruction.

Tuttle stood at the center of the crowd shouting instructions I couldn’t make out over the roar of the fires and panicked voices. Buckets were passed out and people began filling them with snow and rushing off to the houses that hadn’t caught yet. Another group took axes and ran to the stands of trees between houses, hoping to fell them and create firebreaks.

It seemed hopeless. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of burning. There was screaming as the crowd surged and pushed. Tuttle tried to keep people organized, but his voice was getting more and more drowned out.

Someone forced a bucket into my hand and I was pushed on by the crowd, Jenny beside me.

“We’re going to the school,” she shouted into my ear. To her right were Jackson and Derrick and some others.

“They sent the little ones there,” Derrick said. “Thought they’d be safe there during the fight. We think some of them are still there now!”

I remembered the plume of smoke I’d seen rising from the school roof and broke into a run. There were about twenty of us, some with axes and some with buckets. We tore down the hill and across the parking lot to the school.

It was better off than many of the houses, but smoke was seeping out of the cracks of doorways and some of the windows were lit up with flames. Derrick led a group to a snowbank nearby where they began to fill their buckets.

“Where are they?” I asked Derrick. “The kids?”

“Toward the back, I think.”

I dropped the bucket and once Jenny, Jackson, and I made it to the school’s front doors, I slammed my shoulder into them. The doors gave with a screech and a wave of heat. It was worse inside than it looked. Jenny motioned some of Derrick’s team into the doorway and they began tossing loads of snow onto the walls to try to keep the fire from growing. There was a hiss and gasps of steam as some of the flames were squelched.

“Stay low,” Jenny called.

The three of us covered our mouths and noses and ducked down, crawling along the floor where the air was clearer. We checked all of the small classrooms we passed, but each was empty except for overturned desks and chairs. The smoke was already massing in my throat and burning my eyes. We had to find them fast.

The three of us finally reached the main classroom at the end of the hall and tumbled through the doors, coughing. The air inside was clearer, but still just as hot. I doubled over and sucked in a painful breath. At
first the room seemed empty, but then I saw a leg poking out from behind Tuttle’s big desk. “There!”

We found ten of the little ones cowering behind the desk, all of them stained with soot and looking terrified. Jenny dropped to her knees by their side.

“It’s going to be okay, guys,” she said calmly. “Just come with us and we’ll get you out of here.”

The kids shied away at first, like scared animals, but she was finally able to pull them to their feet and lead them back to the doors. I paused by the desk as she went. Jenny turned back.

“Take them out of here,” I shouted.

“What are you going to do?” Jenny asked.

I turned toward the far wall of wooden shelves. Each level was stacked with row after row of books. Science. Government. The arts. Everything.

“Are you crazy? We don’t have time, this place is coming down!”

Over her shoulder I could just see Jackson leading the kids into the smoky hallway.

“Then go! Help Jackson with the kids!”

I knew Jenny would keep protesting, so I turned from her and ran for the bookshelf, weaving through the lines of desks and pulling books off as fast as I could, filling my arms with them. I reached for a copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird,
but Jenny got it first.

“One more stupid thing I have to do because of you,” she said with a sooty smile as she yanked down a score of books.

Our arms were full when there was another moan from behind us. The far wall of the classroom was blackening and about to go. Soon the whole place would be on fire.

“Think we’re out of time, pal. Let’s get out of here!”

Just as we turned to the doors, a curtain of flame appeared, blocking our way. The wall alongside it had begun to smolder too. Smoke was now seeping into the room.

We both stood there, our arms weighed down with books, looking for some way out. The walls around us groaned. Tinder deep inside them crackled and popped. We were trapped.

“Well, Stephen? Any more bright ideas?”

I looked all around the room. I had nothing. The only doors out were blocked and the fire was only growing stronger and hotter. The books felt like lead in my arms. How could I have been so stupid? We were going to die for these? As the smoke grew thicker all I could think of was the whole town wiped away, little more than a smudge of ash in the woods. All they had done, all they had built, would be lost, forgotten.

“We have to just run for it,” Jenny said. “Drop the books and jump through the fire. It’s the only way.”

It was insane. The fire had grown too big, feeding off the old wood. “Jenny, no. We can’t —”

“Just do it!”

Jenny dropped the load in her arms, but then someone screamed my name from behind us. I turned to see Jackson leaning through the open window high up on the back wall.

“Come on,” he shouted. “This way!”

I looked up at the window. It was narrow and set a good fifteen feet high. We’d never make it. I spun around the room, hunting for a solution, but all I saw were desks and chairs and … something snapped. I had it.

“The desks!” I shouted to Jenny. “Come on.”

Jenny started grabbing desks out of their neat rows and dragging them over to the window. There, we stacked desk upon desk until we made a ladder leading up to the window. Jackson knelt at the window’s edge and held out his hand. I pushed Jenny up first. When she reached the top she turned and held her hand out for me, but instead of starting the climb I reached back and gathered the stacks of books.

“Come on!”
Jenny urged.

“Hey, remember how I promised Tuttle I’d bring about the new golden age?”

“Stephen!”

“I’m not moving until you take them!”

Jenny grimaced but held out her hands as I dug into the piles and handed up as many as I could. She passed them off to Jackson, then dove through the window and reached down for my hand.

“Okay, now you!”

The desks were shakier than I’d thought. The thin metal legs quivered as I climbed. I could feel the heat of the fire singeing my back, growing by the second. I made it up one desk, then two, but as I reached for the third, there was another collapse behind me and I felt the bottom desk shift and falter.

“Jump!”

My legs shook. There was a crash as the desks tumbled beneath me and then I was falling, my arms pinwheeling as the hands of gravity pulled me backward, down into the smoke. There was a strange moment as Jenny’s face seemed to rush away from me and everything else slowed down. I felt weightless and weak and I knew there was nothing I could do. I would fall and the smoke would swallow me whole, but at least Jenny and Jackson and the kids would be safe. I closed my eyes, accepting it, but then I jerked to a stop.

I opened my eyes and there was Jenny leaning halfway out of the window, her hand locked onto my wrist.

“Gotcha,” she said, and then other hands appeared, latching on to me and dragging me up toward the window. As I got closer, Jackson took hold of my sleeve. I grabbed on to them, pushed against the wall with my feet, and climbed, the fire licking at my heels.

When I made it to the window more hands reached out: Derrick’s, Martin’s, Carrie’s, and others’. I felt the cold, fresh air rush into my lungs and I bent over, coughing, then fell onto my side. Behind my friends were the ring of little ones and a stack of books mostly untouched by the fire.

I had only a moment to rest before Jenny lifted me up and we all stumbled away from the building and out to the battlefield. Once we were far enough away, we stopped and turned back to the school.

Flames had consumed most of the west wall and were spreading around to the front. Soon the roof groaned and fell in. When it did, the fire surged, lighting up the gray sky and filling it with columns of smoke. It seemed as though only minutes passed before there was nothing but piles of burning wood and scattered bricks.

I remembered sitting inside that first day, desperate to flee, feeling alien and alone amid all those kids who seemed nothing like me. I looked around at the group of us now. Everyone was streaked with ash and peppered with burns and trails of blood, our clothes torn into ruins. Carrie was leaning into John Carter’s shoulder while Derrick and Martin sat on a snowbank on either side of Wendy, helping her wash the ash out of her eyes. Jenny’s hand fell into mine.

Standing there as the school burned, that group of us drew together into a tight little band that felt solid as iron. The houses could burn and the school could fall, but maybe together we’d survive.

“Look,” someone said.

We turned toward the field just as a group of people emerged from the trees opposite us, maybe forty in all. “Are they ours?” Derrick asked.

“All of our people went back to fight the fires,” Jenny said.

The group moved slowly, weaving their way past the bodies and the wreckage of the jeep. They definitely weren’t slavers, but as they got closer I made out the thin silhouettes of rifles in their hands.

Whoever they were, we still weren’t done for the day.

Jenny, Jackson, and I moved the younger kids back into the woods with Derrick and the others.

“Should we go get Mom and Dad?” Jackson asked.

Jenny shook her head. “There’s too much to do down there. Looks like it’s just us.”

The three of us made our way through the carnage, our boots sliding on the muddy and blood-soaked snow. As soon as the others saw us coming, they unslung their rifles and lifted them. The three of us slowed.

“Just stay calm,” I whispered. “Don’t make any sudden moves and keep your hands where they can see them.”

It was a ragged group, a mix of old and young. They weren’t clothed or fed as well as those in Settler’s Landing, but we couldn’t mistake that for weakness. Some looked just as scared as I imagined Jenny and Jackson and I did, but some also looked hard and ready for whatever might happen. They would use their weapons, no doubt about it.

This looked especially true of the one I took for their leader. He was a tall, rail-thin man with a scraggly black-and-white beard and a patch over one eye. He had a chrome revolver attached to his hip but was so
calm he hadn’t even drawn it yet, just moved across the field with his hand resting on the pistol’s grip.

We kept our approach slow and easy until there was only about ten feet separating us. Everything around us stank of blood and fire. Jenny and Jackson and I stopped where we were; the man with the patch lifted one hand, and his people stopped too. Gun barrels dipped slightly but did not drop.

No one said anything for a moment as we took a measure of one another. I looked back over my shoulder. No one in sight. Everyone was still in town fighting the fires. A shot of nerves quaked through me. I’d have given anything for Marcus and the others to appear, but we were on our own.

I took a step forward. My mouth felt full of cotton. My hands shook.

“You’re from Fort Leonard,” I said.

The man nodded slowly. “Looks like you all had a bit of trouble here.”

“Yes sir.”

The man appraised the field around us and spit on the ground. “Slavers. We passed a bunch of them retreating on the way over. No coincidence they were here, I guess.”

“No sir.”

“You all hired them to take care of us.”

I looked over at Jenny and Jackson. I could tell both of them were scared, but they were putting on stony faces. I felt their strength bleed into me, straightening my spine, making me even more sure of what I had to do.

“Yes sir,” I said. “We did.”

“Guess it didn’t go as planned.”

“Some of us thought the folks who hired them shouldn’t be running things anymore,” Jenny said from beside me. “When we told them and the slavers to take off, they went after us.”

“You think I’m going to thank you for deciding
not
to turn all of me and mine into slaves?”

“No sir,” Jenny said.

It went quiet again and I had to fight to keep still. This wasn’t going right.
What were we thinking, coming up here?

“Stephen, Jenny, Jackson — step away from there!”

The three of us whipped around to see Marcus and Sam and about ten others appear on the field behind us. Each of them had a gun trained on the people from Fort Leonard, who in turn raised theirs with a metallic clatter. The man with the patch had his gun out now and was pointing it right in Marcus’s face. The chrome hammer was drawn all the way back.

“Stephen,” Marcus said slowly, “take Jenny and Jackson and move out of the way.”

I swallowed hard. “They’re not here to fight,” I said.

“Stephen.”

I turned to the man with the patch. “Are you?”

The man tightened his grip on the revolver.

“They killed two friends of ours. We will fight if we need to, son.”

“Tell them it was an accident,” Jenny pleaded.

“Just get out of the way!”

I turned away from Marcus and back to Fort Leonard’s leader.

“It was my fault,” I said. “Okay? It was a dumb prank. I made everyone here think your people were attacking us and that’s why they sent the group that shot your friends. So if you want to shoot someone, then shoot me, but we’re telling you the truth. The ones who sent the people
who killed your friends, the ones who hired the slavers, are not in charge anymore. I swear they’re not.”

The man with the patch considered this as we all held our breath.

“Look,” I said, as steady as I could, “the people who came before us nearly destroyed the whole world, but that was yesterday. This is today, and today we’ve got a choice, right?”

The group from Fort Leonard gripped the stocks of their guns like they were trying to keep their heads above water. If the wind blew wrong, they’d fire. And if they did, Marcus and his people would too.

“Marcus,” I said, “have everybody put their guns down.”

“Them first,” Marcus said. “We’re not —”

“Just do it,” Jackson commanded, turning around to face his father. “You’ve come this far. Just go one step further.”

Marcus gripped the rifle to his shoulder, sweat cutting channels through the soot on his face.

Jenny took a step toward him. “Please, Dad,” she said, and reached out to lay her palm over his rifle’s sight.

Painfully slow, Marcus lowered the barrel of his rifle, keeping his eyes on the people from Fort Leonard the entire time, looking for any hint they were about to take advantage. When they didn’t, he lowered his gun all the way and then motioned for Sam and the others to do the same.

Jenny turned to the man with the patch. “Now you.”

The man looked back at his people and gave a slight nod. All around us gun barrels wilted and fell until we stood there, two divided fronts without a war to fight.

Marcus took a tentative step forward and held out his hand.

“Marcus Green,” he said.

The man holstered his revolver, then lifted his own hand to take Marcus’s.

“Stan Allison.”

The two stood silently for a moment. Marcus looked back over his shoulder at the smoke rising above the trees.

“If you all could spare it,” he said, “we could really use some help.”

Stan nodded, then waved his people forward. Marcus and Sam and the others from Settler’s Landing led the way, but soon the people from Fort Leonard had caught up. They all mixed together, one side indistinguishable from the other as they marched toward the fires.

We watched them go, then Jenny took my hand and Jackson’s, and once we gathered up the little ones, we followed them back to town, all of us hoping there would be something left.