Jeff Hirsch: The Eleventh Plague

I drew the scope down along the length of the plane, marveling at its size, until I came to the tail where I could make out a big white star.

“It’s American,” I said, lowering the rifle.

Dad nodded. “B-88,” he said. “Probably heading to Atlanta. Or Memphis. I don’t think it crashed, though — it’s pretty intact. Looks like it tried to land and failed. Must have been forced down somehow.”

I waited for him to make the next move, but he went silent after that, staring at it. Adults were always weird when it came to talking about the Collapse. Embarrassed, I thought, like kids caught breaking something that wasn’t theirs.

“Well… we better check it out. Right?”

“Guess we better. Come on.”

We got to the plane about an hour later. The two halves sat just feet from each other, like pieces of a cracked egg. The plane’s wings were hunched over and crumpled. A bright bloom of flowers had grown up around them, taking root and shining purple in the sun.

I led Paolo over to where he could munch on some flowers and followed Dad to the opening. The plane had split in two just behind the cockpit, which was closed off with loads of twisted metal. To our right was the empty bomb bay. I leaned in, squinting past the wreckage. It was bright at the mouth of the steel cave, but toward the back it grew dark enough that I could only make out a jumble of broken metal covered with dirt and vines and weeds.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t look like there’s anything here. Maybe we should—”

“It’s gonna be fine,” Dad said. “We’ll make it quick. In and out, okay?”

“We’ll need the flashlight.”

Dad tugged at the end of his beard, then nodded. I pulled the light off the back of the wagon and rejoined him. There was a narrow catwalk that led alongside the bomb bay to the back of the plane. Dad stepped up onto it and shuffled crablike down its length. I crept along behind him until we came to the remains of a steel bulkhead separating the compartments. It had been mostly torn away, but we still had to crouch down low to get through it.

It was humid inside, and musty smelling. I slapped the flashlight on its side until its beam ran down the length of the plane.

The back section was lined with a series of workstations, alcoves where I imagined soldiers performing their various duties. All that was left of them were welded-in steel shelves and short partitions. All the chairs, electronics, and wiring had been ripped out long ago by people like us. Vines crept up the walls and hung from the ceiling. Every so often some rusty metal lump emerged from underneath the plants, like the face of someone drowning.

“Why would it have been going to Atlanta?” I asked, hoping to drive the eerie silence out of the air. Dad’s answer didn’t help.

“P Eleven.”

I shivered as he said it.

“We tried to quarantine the big cities, but the people inside didn’t want to be cooped up with the sick, so the government decided to burn them out.”

“They bombed their own people?”

“Didn’t see any other choice, I guess. If it got out… ‘Course, in the end it didn’t matter. Got out anyway.”

After that first spark the war escalated fast. It was only a few months before the United States launched some of its nukes at China and its allies. P11H3 was what China came back with. Everybody just called it P11 or the Eleventh Plague. It was nothing more than a souped-up strain of the flu, but it ate through the country like wildfire, infecting and then killing nearly everyone it touched. The last reliable news anyone heard before the stations went off the air said it had killed hundreds of millions in the United States alone.

I cleared my throat to chase out the shakes. We had to stay focused on the task. The faster we got done, the faster we’d be on our way. “See anything worthwhile?” I called out.

Dad appeared in the beam of my flashlight, blocking the light out of his eyes with his hand. “Looks like it’s been pretty picked over already. Let’s check farther back.”

We rummaged through the rubble but only found the remains of some seats and a few crumbling logbooks. There were lockers along the walls but they were rusted shut or empty. Useless. It was as though we were wandering through the remains of a dinosaur, picking through its bones.

“Last of its kind,” Dad said, patting the wall. “These things went into production right before the Collapse.”

The Collapse followed in the wake of P11. With so few people left alive, everything just shut down. Factories. Hospitals. The government. The military crumbled. Power stations blew one by one until the electricity went out countrywide. It was like America had been wired up to one big switch and the Eleventh Plague was the hand that reached up and clicked it all off. Millions more must have died in the darkness and neglect that followed.

“See anything?” Dad asked.

I shook my head. “Nah. Let’s get out of here, okay?”

“All right, all right.” Dad patted my shoulder as we started back for the bulkhead. “Hey, what’s that?”

“What?”

Dad knelt down by a metal locker at my feet. It was partially hidden under the overhang of one of the workstations, right by a small crack in the plane’s skin that let in a finger of sunlight. Dad pushed a cover of weeds and dirt out of the way.

“It’s just an old locker,” I said. “If there was anything in it, someone would have taken it already.”

“Maybe they didn’t see it. Come here and give me a hand.”

I looked up through the bulkhead to the open air outside. We were so close. “It’s rusted shut. We’ll never get it open.”

“We can’t get careless when it comes to salvage, Stephen,” Dad snapped. “Now come on. Pull on it when I do, okay? On three. One. Two. Pull!”

We threw our backs into it and, surprising both of us, the lid screeched loudly and popped off, throwing us on our butts with a heavy thud.

“Ha! See? Me and you, kid, we can do anything!” Dad pulled himself back up and leaned over the open locker, rubbing his palms together. “So, what’ve we got here?”

At first glance it wasn’t much. Dad handed back a thick blue blanket that was worth keeping. There was a moment of excitement when he found stacks of prepackaged military rations, but they were torn up and past their prime. Worthless.

“Okay. Can we go now?”

“In a second. We —” Dad froze, his eyes going wide. “Oh my God.” I scrambled to join him. “What? What is it?” He reached deep into the locker and struggled with something I couldn’t see.

“Dad?”

His back flexed and he managed to lift whatever it was into the light.

“What is—”

It was a metal can. Not one of the little ones we used to find lining the shelves of abandoned grocery stores, but a big one. Forty-eight ounces at least. Dad turned it around so that the light shone on the label. It read, simply, in black letters: PEARS.

“Fruit,” Dad said, his voice thick with awe. “Good Lord, it’s canned fruit. Jesus, how long has it been?”

Two years at least. Dad had saved a can of pears for my thirteenth birthday. Since then if we had fruit, it was a runty crab apple or a nearly juiceless orange. My stomach cramped and my mouth watered at the memory of those pears and the sweet juice they sat in.

Dad set the can down between us, then scrambled into his back pocket for the can opener. He was about to crack it open when my hand shot out and snatched his wrist.

He looked up at me, his eyes looking almost crazed. “Steve—”

“We can’t.”

“What do you mean, we can’t?”

“What would Casey give us for this?”

“Stephen,” Dad laughed. “Look, I don’t know, but—”