Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

She whirled around to face him. “It’s Tan! My name is Jenny Tan!”

Jenny ran up the road, disappearing into the darkness. It was quiet then, like the aftermath of a storm. Most of the other parents had drifted off, injured sons in tow, leaving Caleb Henry and his grim circle.

“Beset on all sides,” Caleb intoned, looking from the Greens to me. His blue eyes reflected the twisting fire. “Even from within.”

Marcus was about to say something back, but Violet appeared at his shoulder and he swallowed whatever it was. Caleb grinned wolfishly, satisfied, and drifted out of the group, his followers trailing behind him like smoke.

Marcus stood in the middle of the road, his shoulders slumped, his hand clasped on the back of his neck. Violet rested her hand on his arm. He looked up wearily and nodded.

Jackson was sitting against the wagon. His knees were drawn up to his chest, head back, staring blankly up at the stars. I would have thought he was praying, except for how his hands were curled into bone-white fists. He saw me and forced a smile.

“Welcome to Settler’s Landing.”

Soon the park emptied and I followed the Greens inside.

“Jackets on the rack, everyone,” Violet announced as we entered. Jackson and Marcus dutifully obeyed, stripping off their coats and hanging them just inside the door.

“If I don’t keep at them, they’re pigs,” she said. Once Violet got me settled in the room with Dad, she disappeared into the kitchen with Marcus.

I stood by Dad’s bed, pulling my thin blanket out of my backpack.

“Sorry for all that tonight,” Jackson said from the doorway behind me. “You can pretty much bet that if Jenny sees calm water, she’ll throw in the biggest rock she can.”

“She’s your… sister?” I asked, still amazed that a Chinese girl lived with them.

“Adopted, yeah. I was little, so I don’t really remember, but Mom said we went through this town the day after some big fight and there she was, wrapped in this old Chinese army jacket she always wears. She was all cut up and bloody. Mom figured whoever her parents were must have left her, thinking she was a goner, or maybe they got killed themselves. Anyway, Mom fixed her up and took her along with us.”

“So how does she know her real name is Tan?”

Jackson laughed. “She doesn’t,” he said. “That’s the thing — she just made it up. Guess that’s how much she didn’t want to be one of us. Anyway, she’ll go sleep it off in this old barn she goes to, out north of town. She’ll be well rested and ready to embarrass us again soon enough.”

I rolled my sweatshirt up into a pillow and laid it out on the blanket. Jackson stood behind me a little while longer, then stepped back into the hallway.

“Well… anyway, good night,” he said.

Soon I heard the creaking of stairs and the soft shutting of a door. I blew out the candles scattered around the room and the house settled into darkness.

Even in the dark, Dad’s skin was powdery and pale against his beard. His cheeks were sunken and there were hollows around his eyes. He looked like a stranger. An aching homesickness shot through me. There was so much that was new: these people, this place. I wished we could be back on the trail, just the two of us.

I closed my eyes, praying I’d drift off immediately, but of course I didn’t. In fifteen years I had spent the night in tents and caves and abandoned buildings but never once in a house. I couldn’t breathe. I wrestled the window over Dad’s bed open, letting in the rhythmic chirp of crickets and the blow of the wind rustling through the trees.

Across the park, the other houses loomed in the moonlight, their unlit windows like blank, staring eyes. Looking at it all made me feel the whole Earth tilting underneath me. Every other time in my life when I felt like this, I would go to Dad and it seemed, with just a wave of his hand, he could make things right again.

Before I went to sleep, I leaned over his chest, straining to hear the soft pat of a heartbeat, but what was there was too soft and too far away to grasp.

I was on my own.

I woke with a start before dawn, disoriented. But soon the memories of the day before fell into place and everything began to clear. The house was quiet. Dad hadn’t moved.

I pulled my blanket aside and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, wondering what I was supposed to do next. No salvage to secure, no trail to start down. I felt like some great wheel was spinning inside me, but it had nowhere to go.

I slipped into my jeans and moved through the downstairs rooms, exploring. I found a sharpened stub of a pencil and an old nickel lying in a dusty corner and pocketed them. Other than that, there wasn’t much I hadn’t seen the night before. A few pieces of furniture. The pictures. The big wooden cabinet.

I froze, remembering the glass and shining metal, and how Violet had shut the drawer so quickly, like she didn’t want me to see inside. I closed my eyes and listened to the house. Nothing. I slipped over to the cabinet and opened the top drawer. Inside there were gleaming rows of silver instruments: razors and scissors, picks and tweezers. I lifted out a large saw with brutal teeth. I set it down and moved to the next drawer.

There, lying on strips of green felt, were the rows of frosted glass bottles. They all had white labels, with words like Morphine and Penicillin written on them in precise black letters. Marcus said Violet had been an army doctor. I guessed maybe she had done a bit of salvaging too before the military broke up. Whatever the case, it was a gold mine. For a fraction of what was in that cabinet, we could get a new wagon and mule, maybe even a horse, and enough supplies to get us trading again.

A spring squeaked upstairs, followed by the sound of feet hitting the floor. I scrambled to make sure everything was in its place and then shut the drawers. When the Greens came downstairs, I was sitting innocently at Dad’s side.

“How we doing this morning, Aloysius?” Marcus asked. He was standing in the doorway that led back to the kitchen, munching on a hard-boiled egg. He had a bowl of them in his hands.

“Who’s Aloysius?”

“You are,” Marcus said. “Well, at least until you tell us your real name.” Marcus held the bowl out to me. “Egg?”

I hesitated for a second, but then the hunger took over.

“It’s Stephen,” I said as I plucked an egg from the bowl.

“You think about what you’d like to do today, Stephen?”

I glanced out the window. It was a bright fall morning, crisp. A full moon still hung in the sky, fading as the sun rose. Every part of me yearned to be out of the stifling closeness of the house.

“I should just stay here,” I said. “With my dad.”

“You sure?” Marcus asked. He gave me a moment, then turned back toward the kitchen. “Okay. Suit yourself.” His boots echoed down the short hallway.

“Wait,” I called before he could disappear. “Maybe…” My mind spun in place. Wouldn’t Grandpa have given me a pounding if he knew I was in a place like this and didn’t take the time to do a little recon? I mean, who knew what else I’d find? “For all you’ve done for us… I can’t pay you, but maybe I could work.”

“I told you, there’s no reason to—”

I turned my eyes from the window and set them on Marcus, unmoving. It was a look that, when Grandpa used it, said there would be no compromise, no discussion. To my surprise, it actually worked.

“Well, there’s a little of the fall harvest left,” Marcus conceded. “It’s not much but—”

“It’s fine,” I said. A buzz of excitement lit through me. Just the idea of being out in the open air was a weight lifted off my shoulders.