Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

Before I knew it, the grass seemed to be moving under my feet. I trotted, head down, toward the game.

“It’s okay, everybody!” Derrick shouted as I reached the edge of the field, hanging back from the team. “Our savior is here! Steve will fill in for Stan.”

“Can he even play?” someone shouted from back in the lineup.

“Can he play?” Derrick repeated, dumbstruck. “He’s a heckuva lot better than any of us. His dad was an actual New York Yankee before the Collapse. Taught him everything he knew.”

The flash of embarrassment hit again as the team erupted into a chorus of oohs and aahs.

Derrick leaned in. “You, uh, do know how to play, right?” he whispered.

“In theory.”

“Well, you’re still one up on Stan,” Derrick said. “Anyway, you’re at bat!”

“Oh wait, maybe someone else should—”

But Derrick was already pushing the bat into my hand. He and the others were cheering me from behind the fence to home plate. I felt like I was being pushed onstage to star in a play I didn’t know any of the words to.

“Hit and run!” Derrick shouted. “Just hit and run!”

“Tear the cover off it, Steve!” Jackson yelled.

“Don’t suck,” Stan called from the bench.

My stomach quivered, but I found myself raising the bat to my shoulder, readying myself for a fresh disaster. I took a deep breath and got into a slight crouch, eyes on the pitcher. He nodded at the catcher behind me, then started his windup. Before I could move an inch, the ball slapped into the catcher’s glove.

“Well done,” he said, smirking as he tossed the ball to the pitcher. “I think you’re a natural.”

“It’s okay, Steve!” Jackson shouted. “That one wasn’t yours!”

The pitcher turned back, a big grin on his face. I raised the bat and crouched, scowling. He wound up and threw, but this time it was like everything slowed down. I could see the white ball tumbling toward me. The voices behind me elongated. I brought the bat around in a quick arc, and as it connected with the ball there was a sweet, sharp crack. The ball sailed out into the field, over the head of the pitcher, into the outfield.

Dopey and amazed, I watched as the ball lifted into the sky and over the trees whose top branches moved in the wind like hands waving good-bye. I turned back to my team, bat dangling from my hand, eager to share this incredible triumph, but they were all standing on the tips of their toes, looks of terrified anticipation on their faces.

“Don’t just stand there, you moron!” Carrie screamed from second, shattering the moment. “Run!”

Oh! Right! Now I run!

The bat clattered at my feet as I took off. I passed first base easily, then skidded in to second. The baseman there was pivoting toward the outfield and raising his glove, his eyes squinting to track the ball headed his way. In a second he’d have me, so as I got closer I threw my shoulder out and it connected with his right arm. It knocked him off balance enough to make him miss the throw. The ball bounced off his glove and bobbled into the outfield. While he was scrambling for it, I was leaving him behind and making for third base in a cloud of dust.

Carrie waved her hands wildly to get me to stop, but it was like there was this engine in me that was running nearly out of control and there was no way I could stop it even if I wanted to. It felt too good: my feet ripping into the soft dirt, my lungs and legs pumping madly, the distant sound of cheering. Finally Carrie was forced to abandon her base and run for home. Following her, I rounded third, digging in and pushing myself faster. I was halfway there when I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye — an arm reeling back to throw a ball.

“Dive!” Jackson shouted.

I threw my arms out in front of me without thinking, as though I was diving into a huge, clear lake, and I sailed across the next few feet, weightless, stretching for home. When the ground leapt up to meet me, it was like jumping headfirst into concrete. The impact rang through me and I got a face full of dirt, grass, and bits of rock. When I could move again, I rolled painfully to my side and saw the catcher standing there with the ball in his hand.

He dropped his arm to tag me, but stopped when he saw my outstretched fingers, straining, but definitely, without a doubt, touching the flat gray rock that was home.

We played until the sun sank behind the trees and cast gold-streaked shadows across the field, then we gathered up our equipment and started the walk back to town. I trailed behind the main pack with Jackson, Derrick, and the other side’s pitcher, John Carter.

“You did good, Steve,” Derrick said. “I mean, you kind of tanked after that first run, but—”

I surprised myself by giving Derrick a playful shove, knocking him into Jackson. He was right — after that first run, I had struck out three times in a row. When it was time for us to play defense, I was stuck safely way out in right field.

“So you really never played before?” John asked.

“No. Never.”

“Not anything?”

I scooped up a pebble from the road and skipped it down the asphalt. “Dad found this old football once, out behind a Walmart. We’d play catch with that sometimes.”

Up ahead, Carrie drifted toward the four of us, falling in next to John and taking his hand. “You guys up for going to the quarry?”

John said sure, but Derrick hedged. “I don’t know. I really have to do my homework and then get right to bed.”

“Shut up, Derrick,” Carrie said. “What about you, Steve? It’s just this place out to the east, like a manmade pond. We go there after games sometimes.”

I looked over my shoulder, back to where Dad lay in a deep coma at the Greens’ house, but the tug I felt toward him seemed fainter than it had before. I knew he was safe since Violet was with him. And hadn’t she said he would have wanted me to go to school if I could? Well, maybe he would want this too. Me playing baseball. Me with people my own age. Having a life a little bit like he must have had back before the Collapse.

“Yo!” Carrie called out. “Everybody! Quarry!”

We continued up the hill and then moved out to the east of town, past the fields and into the trees as night began to settle around us. After a while the path opened up into a circular clearing, the ground at the center of it falling away in rocky steps, leading down to a pool of water that was dotted with the reflections of stars that were just beginning to appear.

Everyone scattered when we got there, breaking up into smaller groups of two or three or four and finding places around the pool. One kid, the third baseman from the other team, dipped his hand into the water and pulled out a net that was filled with mason jars. He unscrewed the top off one, took a long drink of whatever was inside, then passed it around the circle.

When it came to me I dipped my nose in and caught the smell of rotten fruit and a nose-singeing tang of alcohol. Home brew. Grandpa used to trade for it sometimes when we had some salvage to spare, and he would get blisteringly drunk on it after dinner. Mom would generally lead me into the tent for a reading lesson whenever he got going.

I took a small sip, then winced. “So, how did all of you end up here?” I asked.

“We were coming north from Georgia,” Martin said from his place behind me. “And we ran into, like, this entire ex-US army regiment. Dad decided we’d go through these caves he found to get around them. Took us five days. Five days with no food. My brother” — Martin’s voice hitched, then he continued — “he was really freaking out. Cried the whole time until we found our way out. We had no idea where we were, but a few weeks later, we found Derrick and his folks. And then Jackson and his. Now here we are.”