Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

As soon as he stopped talking, Martin stared down into the dark water, his face cloudy and distant. I knew why, of course, could tell from the millisecond stumble after he said “my brother.” It was the same one I always made after saying “my mother.” Somehow between that story and now, his brother was lost. I nudged Martin with the edge of the jar and held it out to him.

“Thanks,” he said.

Others told their stories and as they did I looked around the group, noticing things I hadn’t seen before. A long jagged scar along the forearm of the blond kid who played right field. A deep smudgelike burn mark peeking out from under the sweater of the redheaded girl sitting on the other side of me. The more I looked, the more I saw them, those telltale marks of lives lived after the Collapse. How had I not noticed them before? Was it possible that they all had lives like mine at some point until they came here?

What would have happened, I wondered, if Dad had stood up to Grandpa when I was little and insisted we leave the trail? Could we have ended up here? Would we be living in houses and going to school and cookouts and baseball games?

Would Mom still be alive?

The redheaded girl tapped my arm with a second jar of home brew that had made its way around the circle. I shook my head and she passed it along down the line.

“I’m Wendy, by the way,” she said quietly, her small fingers grazing my arm. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m—”

“Cann-on-ball!”

There was a gigantic splash that soaked all of us. When I looked up, Derrick was shooting to the surface of the churning water, in his underwear, a dopey smile on his face. Two of the mason jars sat empty where he had been sitting. Jeers came from every corner of the quarry, but they were all mixed with laughter.

“Derrick!”

“Derrick, you jerk!”

“You got us all wet!”

Derrick laughed a deep stuttering laugh and floated lazily on his back.

Wendy shook her great head full of curls and chuckled. “Love, hate. Love, hate. That’s all it ever is with him.”

“Okay!” Carrie said, rising unsteadily from John’s lap. “I think that’s our cue, babe.”

John offered me his hand. “Hey, man, good job today.”

“Thanks. You too.” Carrie dragged John up and the two of them said their good-byes and headed down the path to town with their arms around each other’s waists. Soon, other couples emerged from the woods and drifted home.

“Well,” Jackson said, “I guess we should go pull him out.”

Martin and Jackson and I stripped off our shoes, rolled our pant legs up high, and went in after Derrick. Luckily by that time he was pretty tired, so it wasn’t too hard to catch him. The trick was getting his bulk out of there and to shore while he mumbled over and over how much he loved us.

“Really, honestly, totally, you dudes are awesome. Just awesome,” he said, struggling with his pants.

After we finally got Derrick up and dressed, but before we could get him moving down the path, he lurched forward and grabbed me up into a soggy bear hug, pushing us away from the others.

“This is what it’s like, Steve,” he whispered intently only inches from my ear. His breath was heavy with the sweet cherry smell of the home brew.

“What what’s like, Derrick?”

He pulled back slightly and for a moment didn’t seem drunk at all. His eyes were clear and focused.

“This is what it’s like to have friends,” he whispered.

I stood there in the silence as a grin grew across Derrick’s face and then he fell into Wendy’s and Martin’s arms. “Home, friends! Take me to my home! And you! Wendy! Off with your pants! You too, Marty!”

He giggled as Wendy and Martin led him down the path back to town. I stood there motionless, surrounded in the rhythmic chatter of the grasshoppers and cicadas and the gentle lapping of the quarry’s water. Everything seemed to hang in perfect balance, all of it strange and welcome at the same time.

This is what it’s like to have friends.

“You okay?”

Jackson was standing in the shadows, waiting.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

We left the quarry and made our way through the woods to Jackson’s house. Before we got there, though, we slowed without a word and stopped in the park across the street. Jackson sat on one of the swings and I climbed up onto the jungle gym next to him.

To our left, the road wound out of town and away like a ribbon. The pinpricks of candlelight in the windows around us gave the neighborhood the look of a constellation come to Earth.

“So how’d you guys end up here?” I asked. “You never said.”

Jackson twisted the toe of his sneaker into the dirt. For a second I thought he hadn’t heard me. “We were in, I don’t know, Kentucky, I think, with some other families in a little tent city. Mom and Dad were out doing some hunting, and Jenny and I were by this stream downhill from the camp playing Go Fish with some cards she had made. The sun had just gone down and it was all orange and gold.” Jackson’s fingers curled tight around the swing’s chain. “That’s when we heard them coming. There were maybe fifteen of them. Twenty. They looked just like us. Maybe a little better off. They came into camp, all smiles, asking if they could have some water from the stream. Nice as could be.

“The man who I guess was their leader was walking with Mr. Simms. Mr. Simms was a friend of my dad’s and was in charge of us when Mom and Dad were away. He was older than my folks and lost his whole family to P Eleven and kind of adopted all of us.

“Anyway, the new group’s leader, this big hulk of a guy, put his arm around Mr. Simms’s shoulder as they walked. After a few steps he pulled Mr. Simms close and said, ‘Knock, knock,’ which is the start to this old joke. When Mr. Simms said, ‘Who’s there?’ the man reached into his jacket, pulled out a gun, and pressed the barrel right into Mr. Simms’s temple.”

Jackson’s voice caught in his throat. His eyes were far away, remembering. “I saw him do it and I thought, ‘Oh, this is a joke. It’s a joke.’ But then the man pulled the trigger and there was this explosion and Mr. Simms… dropped.”

Jackson’s Adam’s apple rose and fell and his lips pressed into a tight line.

“Everyone froze. All of us. There wasn’t a sound, just Mr. Simms hitting the ground. Jenny and I stood there watching this fan of blood spread out around his head. Then someone screamed and then everyone was screaming and rushing to their tents for their guns or to escape, but it was too late. The man and his people were everywhere, shooting anyone they could, laughing like it was all this big game, like the rest of us weren’t even real.

“There were about twenty-five, maybe thirty, of us in all. Men and women. Some kids me and Jenny’s age. The leader and his group killed all but us and a couple others. Then they put their guns away, took whatever supplies we had, and strolled back out of town.”

A cold wind blew across the playground and made the trees around us moan. Jackson dug his hands into his jacket pockets.

“Whole thing didn’t take but five minutes. When Mom and Dad came back, we took our things and ran as fast as we could, but no matter how far away we got, I thought they were right around the corner, ready to pop out again, just… smiling and shooting.”

By now the dark of night was settling in. Everything around us — the trees, the houses, the curves of the land — was looming shapes, like animals prowling beneath dark water.

Jackson looked back at me, but I didn’t know what to say to him. If we were friends, like Derrick had said, what did friends do? What did they say?

“Guess somebody like you has never felt like that,” Jackson said quietly, turning away from me. “Afraid.”