Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

I brought Jenny inside the room and we collapsed on the bed, both of us covered in small burns and soot. Jenny’s legs had gotten the worst of it. I pulled out my first-aid kit and carefully cleaned and dressed her wounds. We’d have to keep an eye on them, but for now they didn’t look serious.

Jenny patched me up and then we drank the rest of the water in my canteen. After that we were exhausted and lay down, our arms draped over each other.

Soon Jenny was asleep, but I lay awake for hours as the land outside and the hotel room around us dropped into deeper and deeper darkness.

For some reason I kept seeing the quarry. Me and Jackson surrounded by all his friends. My friends. I skipped back to earlier that day and felt the jolt as I connected with that ball and ran the bases. I felt the wind against my skin and heard the sound of those voices cheering me on.

But all of that was gone now, wasn’t it?

I looked over at Jenny, who was sleeping fitfully, burned and slashed, and my nails dug into my palm. I grimaced at the pain but welcomed it. Because it had been me, hadn’t it? I was the one who sent those people to Jenny’s with torches in hand. If they had killed Jenny, it would have been my fault. If there was a war, it would be my war. The people of Settler’s Landing were a bomb, but I was the one who lit the fuse.

I rolled out of bed and drew the curtains aside. I thought of Dad lying all alone at the Greens’ and felt low and sick. If the war came to Settler’s Landing, it would come for him too.

“They won’t come here.”

I turned away from the window. Jenny was sitting up on the mattress, watching me. “Who?”

“Will and his family. They won’t follow us here.”

“Why not?”

“The square pegs are out of the round holes. They can do what they want now.”

I leaned against the windowsill. “Do you think they’ll really do it? Start a war?”

Jenny winced as she drew her burned legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. Her face filled with moonlight as she peered out the window.

“I think they want the world to be like it was when they were our age. Maybe a war is just the last piece of the puzzle.”

I left the window and pulled out my old bedroll, spreading the small blanket as best I could over us both. We sat up, huddled close together. Jenny laid her head on my shoulder.

“I shouldn’t have gotten you involved,” she said. “In any of it. The fight with Will. The thing at the Henrys’. It was stupid of me.”

“You didn’t know what would happen.”

“I didn’t care,” Jenny said, a knife-edge of bitterness in her voice. She turned and stared out the window, her back to me. “Maybe I just wanted to get back at them and didn’t care who got hurt in the process.”

I reached out until my hand found hers and clasped it tight. She turned. Her cheek was silver in the moonlight.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

We left the casino and Jenny led me down to a billboard on the side of the road. It was the tallest one I had ever seen and dwarfed the trees around it. We climbed to the very top, up rusty and vine-covered handholds — past the smiling, tanned family that claimed AT&T cell phones would keep them connected forever — and sat looking out over the miles of empty land around us.

The night had turned cold with banks of heavy clouds rolling in. Jenny craned her long neck and looked up at a field of stars that glittered in the black. If you looked close, it was almost as though you could see the stars moving, a sparkling dome, turning and turning.

“Used to be you couldn’t even see them,” Jenny said. “With the cities and their lights and pollution and all. At least that’s what Violet said.”

Jenny picked a leaf off a nearby tree and let it drop, watching as it helicoptered down through the emptiness. Jenny leaned into me against the cold and we sat and watched the moon. Far off in the distance the barest wisp of smoke rose like a ribbon from someone’s campfire.

“Do you ever wonder what they’re doing out there?”

“Who?”

“All the other people,” Jenny said. “I mean, there’s a whole world out there, right? Whole other countries. Who knows, maybe there’s some place out there where the Collapse never even happened. Where people are just going about their lives.”

Was it possible? Since we shared a border, P11 hit Mexico and Canada as badly as it did us. But what about everyone else? Were there places that the Collapse never touched? I looked out into the night and wondered.

“If you could make it so it never happened,” Jenny said, “would you?”

I tried to imagine it. The Collapse. The horror of P11. What would this place be like if none of it ever happened? I imagined vast crowds of people packed shoulder to shoulder, scurrying about like ants, our silent world wiped away by electric lights and movie theaters and televisions and cars.

What would our lives be like? Jenny and I never would have met, for one thing. She would be thousands of miles away with a different name and a different family. And since my mom and dad only met because of the war, would I even have existed at all? I knew it was wrong not to wish all that death away; but how could I long for a life, a world, that I never even knew?

“I don’t know,” I said.

Jenny raised her lips to my ear.

“I wouldn’t,” she breathed.

Later, we walked back to the casino and slipped into bed. As Jenny slept, I laid my head on her chest and listened to the thrum of her heart. It sounded like a bird’s wings beating at the air.

I opened my eyes hours later, fully awake, and stared up into the darkness. Jenny was on her side, breathing low and steadily. I dressed quietly and felt my way out of the room and down the hall to the brighter gaming area, navigating toward the front door. The edges around it seemed curiously bright for the hour.

I stepped up to it. Outside, the whole world had changed.

As we slept, the first snow of the year had fallen with a vengeance. It covered everything with a coat of white that was already inches thick. The snow fell lightly now with a musical clink as one crystal stuck to another and settled. With the full moon just visible through some cracks in the clouds the whole place glowed almost as light as day. I buttoned up my coat and made my way across the parking lot, my steps crunching and my breath a white plume trailing behind me.

I had no destination in mind, but I felt this pull to keep going so I followed the highway south for a while, then veered off into the trees. There, I found a circle of land isolated from the snow by the heavy canopy of tree limbs.

I cleared a plot of ground, then knelt down and assembled a pile of brittle leaves and twigs for a fire. The movements Grandpa had showed me years before effortlessly flowed back to me. Soon a spark caught off the fire starter I had in my pocket and the leaves smoldered. I leaned in close and blew on it gently until smoke puffed up and a bit of flame peeked out. This was the most delicate time. Get excited, add too much wood too fast, and the whole thing would be suffocated. Go too slow and the flame would starve and die. I added thin twigs at first, until the flames grew and could sustain themselves, then layered on thicker branches. I watched it burn, the warmth and familiarity of it flowing over me.

“We’re better off now,” Grandpa had said one night as we sat together across a fire. He was shaping a tree branch into the trigger of a small game trap with his knife while Dad slept fitfully behind us. I was hugging my knees, my head down, my throat sore, exhausted from crying and wishing I could disappear.

I was ten. Two newly dug graves, one large and one small, throbbed in the darkness behind us.