Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

For months I had watched Mom’s stomach grow, drunk with wonder. Dad had sat me down and patiently, if awkwardly, explained exactly what was going on, but it meant nothing to me. Clearly, this little person, this little world growing inside her, couldn’t be anything but a miracle. I tried to picture having a brother or a sister. Someone to talk to, to play with, to foist chores off on, to torture in more ways than I could imagine. It was too good to be true.

“What are we going to call it?” I asked Mom one day. “How about Frodo?”

“We’re not calling the baby Frodo.”

“Why not?”

“How about Agnes?” Mom suggested.

“Boring.”

Dad piped up. “Hildegard?”

“Blech.”

“Oh! Oh!” Dad hopped on his toes. “If it’s a boy? Elvis. Aaron. Presley.”

Grandpa, of course, was furious. It would be another mouth to feed. It would slow us down. He went on and on, but as tough as he was, Mom was tougher. She said if everybody thought like that, then the human race was going to disappear pretty fast.

We had planned on being at the Northern Gathering when the baby came — Dad said there were women there who knew about these things — but we were a month’s hike away at best when Mom grasped her stomach and announced that it was time.

“But can’t we stop it?” I’d asked. “Delay it or something?”

“Nope! When it comes, it comes!”

Dad was trying to seem unconcerned, dashing around to make Mom more comfortable, but I could tell he was worried. Mom too. Usually she joked through the worst of times — she always said that’s what joking was for — but as she lay there on the grass that morning, her face was cut with lines of tension and sweat as she strained and cried out and fought. It was as though she was drowning and trying, more and more desperately, to claw her way to the surface of the churning water. Dad tried to help and so did I, but it was no use. There was so much blood.

Three hours into her labor, Mom’s cries stopped.

Her face went slack.

“Bev?”

Dad knelt by her side.

“Bev?”

Her hand slipped from his, like a dove tumbling out of the sky.

Late that night, after the graves had been dug and Dad was finally asleep, I sat alone with Grandpa around that fire as he whittled at a piece of wood with his old hunting knife.

“Learn from this,” he croaked.

“Learn what?” My voice sounded far away, like it was floating somewhere far above my head.

Grandpa glanced over his shoulder where the skeleton frames of the roller coasters rose into the sky. He turned and spit thickly into the fire.

He wasn’t at all the stick figure he would become in just a few years. He was a twisted piece of metal, scarred and pitted and hard. His knife-edge crew cut was thick and gray. Even in the light of the fire his eyes were like pale blue marbles, small and cold.

“She’s better off now.”

Grandpa’s ring glinted as he carved a bloodless gash in the wood and looked at me across the flames.

“We made a mess of things before you were born,” he said. “P Eleven was just what we deserved. It was no plague. It was a blessing. Surviving it, that’s the real plague. But soon it’ll just be… silence.”

Now, as my own fire hissed and sputtered, I wondered: Was he right? Is this how we were meant to live — like animals? Living and dying and hoping for nothing until one day we all disappear?

If we were, then what? Should I just go? On my own? Right then? Violet probably hadn’t retrieved her medicines yet. I could take them, get my pack while Jenny slept, and disappear. Dad would be safe in Violet’s hands. Jenny would be fine on her own. Maybe if we all went our separate ways, if we stayed low to the ground, no towns, no family, no friends, this new end of the world would pass us by. Maybe then we’d all be safe. Maybe Grandpa’s only mistake was that in keeping us together he hadn’t taken things far enough.

The wind surged, blowing the drifts off the ground and the low-hanging tree branches, whiting out everything around me, erasing it. I thought of Jenny lying there in that dark room, curled around the spot where I had been, a warm place in all that cold. I knew that leaving right then might spare us pain later, but I also knew that I was fooling myself if I thought I could do it. There was this chain that ran from me to her. I didn’t know when or how it had come to be, but it was there. I could feel it. I didn’t want to imagine what she’d be like in five or ten or twenty years. I wanted to see it. I wanted to be there.

Besides, in the end, who had Grandpa’s rules ever saved? Not Mom. Not Dad. Not even himself. If it was true that all paths in our world led to only one place, then why not fill whatever path you chose with the best things you could find?

I wasn’t my grandfather. I never would be.

I turned to go back to the casino, but before I took a single step, a dark figure crossed the highway in front of me and moved quickly toward the building, leaning in against the wind. I couldn’t make out who it was, but it didn’t matter. Jenny was alone in there.

My boots crunched through the snow as I raced back, wishing Grandpa’s rifle hadn’t been lost in the fire. I gripped the hilt of Dad’s knife instead. It would have to do.

The figure, in a black coat with the hood turned up, was at the door when I got there, ready to go in.

“Stop!”

I gripped the knife’s handle tight, ready to use it. The figure in black turned to face me and lifted the hood. “Violet?”

She stepped into the white between us. “Stephen?” she said, moving toward me. “Thank God. Are you okay? Is Jenny? I didn’t know they were going to do what they did. When I found out—”

“We’re fine.”

Violet said nothing for a moment. The snow surged, making her body waver, ghostlike and gray.

“What is it, Violet?”

A plane of snow drifted between us as she looked back in the direction of Settler’s Landing.

“He’s gone,” she said. “I came to tell you he’s gone.”

“What? Who’s gone? Violet, what are you—”

But then I knew.

I stepped out onto the Greens’ porch hours later. It was late and everyone was asleep. The snow had finally stopped.

I held a lantern I had found down in the Greens’ basement. The land around me glowed a dazzling white. The roads were gone. The playground had disintegrated into a few ice-covered bars and odd-shaped mounds of snow. The lines that divided one yard from the next had been wiped clean.

I descended the steps and started south. The houses to either side of me were little more than snow-covered cliff faces. Walking through them was like walking along the bottom of a deep canyon.

It wasn’t hard to carry him. As with Grandpa, death had taken Dad a bit at a time until there was almost nothing left. I passed the entrance to the town, the wall now just a long ridge, like a curving collarbone, bleached white in the sun. I crossed the lawn beyond the wall, then passed through the trees and out again until I came to the great empty plain on the other side.

The world had disappeared. There was nothing but white as far as I could see. The casino and the Starbucks were snowy hillocks. Even the towering billboards to the north had been nearly erased.

I walked out into the nothingness until my legs stopped moving. Then I set the lantern down and eased Dad onto a snowbank. As I did it, the sheet covering his face fell away. The crow black of his hair and beard was startling, lying in the middle of all that white. His mouth was slightly open and his skin was a bluish gray. He looked so small. Shrunken and old. People said that the dead looked like they were only sleeping, but it had never seemed that way to me. To me, there was nothing there at all. An empty house. An abandoned world.