Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

“Vi!” Marcus called into the kitchen. “Gonna take Stephen out with me to the harvest.”

“Who’s Stephen?”

“Aloysius.”

“Oh! He should rest!” she yelled back.

“Can’t! Says he has to be our indentured servant.”

“Okay, well, have him clean the gutters while you’re out.”

Marcus laughed. “Come on. I promise you, though, you’ll regret this.”

I pulled on my boots and coat and tucked a piece of jerky into my pocket for later. I started to follow Marcus but stopped at the foot of Dad’s bed. Violet had removed the feeding tube from the night before, so he almost looked like he was just sleeping, his hands resting atop the clean white sheet. Could I really leave him here with these strangers? Then I remembered how Violet had cared for him, even defying Caleb to do it. I leaned down by Dad’s ear quickly, so Marcus wouldn’t see. “I’ll be back,” I whispered.

Marcus grabbed his coat off the rack by the door and then I followed him outside.

The second I stepped out the door I felt like I could breathe again. As we made our way deeper into the neighborhood, kids of all ages blew past us carrying salvaged backpacks and carpetbags. Groups of girls would meet up on the road and separate into age groups, the younger ones squealing and hugging, the older ones trying their best to seem unimpressed. The boys pushed one another, braying laughter loud as donkeys. I flinched as they thundered by and disappeared down a hill that dipped into the trees a few houses from Marcus’s.

“Heading to school,” Marcus said. “Welcome to join them, you know.”

I shook my head at the thought of being shut up inside some room with the screeching horde. I could only imagine what Grandpa would say about running off to school when there was work to be done.

I cracked the egg Marcus had given me and ate it as I scanned the roadside and the yards along the way, looking for treasures like the ones in the Greens’ house, but found little. The place was amazingly neat; only a few scattered toys lay about here and there, abandoned as kids raced to school. The houses, though… what was in all of these houses?

“Listen,” Marcus said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Sorry about Will and all. What are ya gonna do? Last month he accused Winona Lee of being a Fort Leonard spy. She’s eighty-three.”

“What is Fort Leonard anyway?” I asked. “Another town?”

“Barely. It’s a little settlement that popped up to the north. The map says it’s near a place called Fort Leonard. People have a bee in their bonnet since somebody saw a scout poking around east of here the other day. That’s who we were out looking for when we spotted you and your dad.”

I nodded, but didn’t really get it. They brought me and Dad in, two complete strangers, when they were supposed to be out looking for a spy?

The houses thinned out and then the land opened up into five large fields that stretched out about as far as I could see. Most were barren at this point, but the closest one was still full of rows of thick green sprouts. A dozen or so adults circulated around them.

“Well, here we are,” Marcus announced. “The land of plenty! Whole thing used to be the town golf course. Took us almost the whole first year to clear the ground. ‘Bout killed us all, but it was worth it. We bring in a decent amount of wheat and corn and beans now. People mostly raise vegetables in their backyard gardens. Hey, Sam!”

Sam waved from where he was kneeling down in the rows of plants.

“We owe it all to Sam, actually. His people were farmers way back. He told us what was what.”

Sam tipped his hat at the compliment. Marcus held out a handful of thin plastic bags to me. They said SAFEWAY in big red letters.

“Okay,” he said. “You asked for it.”

I took the bags and we picked two rows alongside Sam’s. We were harvesting carrots and onions. I stripped off my coat and sweatshirt and got down on my knees. At first I worked just enough to cover my inspection of the area around me. There wasn’t much to see though. A few farming implements, hoes and shovels mostly, sat nearby. I made a mental note of them.

I ranged out toward a fence that ran along the length of the fields. The branches of the brown-leaved trees squeezed through its narrow openings or surged over top like an advancing army. The fence was warped in places, bent inward from years of trying to hold the forest back. Farther east, the fence disappeared — torn down, I guessed, when they’d cleared the land.

“It used to be a gated community.”

Sam was kneeling in the rows behind me, pushing his hands through the carrot leaves, picking and choosing. Marcus joined us from a few rows down.

“What’s that?”

“Before the Collapse,” Sam continued, “rich people like Marcus here’s family liked to build these self-contained neighborhoods, surround them with fences and security and whatnot. You know, keep out the riffraff. Anyway, this whole place was built right before everything went bad. After that, the people living here closed themselves up. Cut access to the roads, let some of the forest grow back in. With so much going on, they were just forgotten.”

I stopped my digging and sat back on my heels. “What happened to them?” I asked.

“P Eleven,” Marcus said. “Sickness took all but the Henrys. You know? Your buddy Will? His family. They have this big house on the north side. They were here when all of us arrived. Had a hand in building the place, I think.”

“Yeah,” Sam said with a chuckle. “And they still think it’s theirs.”

The sun was out now in full. A flock of birds cut across the sky and landed on the field, pecking briefly at the earth before swarming away again. I looked around at the ten or fifteen people moving through the rows, pulling in a harvest like it was the most natural thing in the world.

It was sad in a way, standing there in the fields, watching them. They’d been lucky, incredibly lucky, but sooner or later I knew their luck would run out, just like it had for Dad and me. Just like it had for everybody. All it would take was one little mistake and they would be found and wiped out.

How could they not know how useless it all was?

“Lunch,” Marcus announced a couple hours later, stretching his back. “You ready, Stephen? I bet Vi has something good for us.”

“Maybe I’ll keep going,” I said, thinking of the house’s awful stillness. “Is that okay?”

“You should come and eat.”

“I’m fine, really. It’s just… it’s good to be doing something. You know?”

Marcus looked over at Sam, who just shrugged. “Kid wants to work.”

“All right,” Marcus said. “But not too much longer.”

I handed Marcus my bags of carrots and he and Sam followed the others back toward the house. Once they were gone, I clapped the dirt off my hands, cut through the fields, and wound through the neighborhood’s unfamiliar streets.

I ended up at the spur of a road leading down a hill, the same one the kids had streamed down earlier on their way to school. I looked over my shoulder: No one was around. I pulled the scrap of jerky from my pocket and chewed on it as I followed the road. Down at the bottom of the hill, there was a black parking lot, cut up into little slips with fading yellow paint. A low building, surrounded by a neatly trimmed yard that stretched behind it, was backed by a hill dotted with one large sycamore. Just behind a sidewalk that ringed the building there was an old sign that said in large black letters: SETTLER’S LANDING HIGH SCHOOL.

I kept close to the school’s beige walls as I passed. Like all the buildings in the neighborhood, it was neat and well maintained, the brick foundation without a crack. The grass around it was short and free of weeds, and I found discarded kids’ things here and there on the ground. A jump rope. A broken colored pencil. I took what I could and kept going.