Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

I covered his face with the sheet and picked up the shovel.

Moving the snow aside was easy enough, but when the blade of the shovel hit the ground, it rang like a bell. My palms ached from the vibration. The ground was nearly frozen.

I had changed back into my old clothes before leaving the Greens’ so when I pulled off my coat, the icy wind tore through my sweater and patchwork pants. I wedged the shovel into a crack in the ground, then leaned my weight into it, pushing the blade an inch or two farther in to break the icy shell. Once I had done that across the entire breadth of the grave, I was able to dig the shovel in farther and remove the dark soil inches at a time. As I got lower, the dirt became looser. The blade of the shovel scraped across rock as it tore into the soil.

Hours later, my muscles were burning and my chest was heaving. Each time I drew breath, the frigid air tore at my lungs. I couldn’t feel my hands or feet. The skin of my ears stung. My body was slick with sweat despite the cold. I stopped digging. Hanging over the shovel’s handle, exhausted, I caught my breath and then checked my progress.

I was standing only about two feet deep in the ground. The shovel fell out of my hands. I dropped back into the snow like a rag doll.

The cold reached up into my back, spread throughout my chest, and curled its fingers around my heart.

“Stephen?”

Jenny stood behind me, our blanket wrapped around her shoulders. When I didn’t say anything she reached for the shovel, but I yanked it away from her and held it to my chest.

“I have to do this myself.”

Jenny stared at me, her hair whipping past her reddened cheeks.

“No you don’t.”

I ignored her. Using the shovel like a crutch, I got back to my feet. I raised the handle painfully over my head and dug down another foot before faltering again and collapsing into a heap. I forced myself up and began again.

When I was finally done, I sat at the foot of the open grave and pulled Dad to me, wrapping my arms around his thin chest.

I closed my eyes and could see his face as it was, lit from the inside as he held up that first slice of pear in the darkness of a dead plane, then the iron look that came over him when he decided he was going to be a hero for the first time since Mom left us.

I heard his booming laugh and his shuddering sobs as he sat by his father’s grave and Mom’s and the daughter’s he would never know. I felt his chest rise and fall alongside mine, his breath like the dry turning of pages in a book.

All of that had come to this.

Stillness.

A yawning silence.

Like none of those things had ever been.

Jenny helped me lower him down until the white glow of his shroud disappeared in the darkness at the bottom of the grave. He looked like a child, curled up and helpless. Alone. I reached into my back pocket and found the sharp edge of our family photograph. I raised it up into the dim moonlight, tracing the lines of me and Mom and Dad smiling together for one of the last times, before holding it over the grave and dropping it in. It fluttered like a leaf and settled onto his chest.

I stood there for some time, feeling the pull of the grave, like a cold arm wrapping itself around my shoulders and drawing me down with him.

I took up the shovel and filled the hole.

When it was done, I stumbled and fell back onto the ground. A new swirl of snow appeared out of the gray, lightening sky. It seemed like the body of a great white bear tumbling down onto me, its claws outstretched.

I shut my eyes, and let it have me.

There was a crash as I fell into one of the gaming tables that littered the casino floor. How did I get here? I wondered distantly, then Jenny’s hands dug into my shoulder and pulled me up. She threw my arm over her shoulder and pushed me blindly through the dark. My bones ached from the cold. My skin burned. I couldn’t stop shivering. I remembered kneeling by the grave in the snow. I told her to leave me with Dad, but she wouldn’t listen. I wanted to tell her again, but now I couldn’t speak.

Jenny dropped me down on the bed in the back room and covered me up with all the blankets we had, tucking them tight around my body like a cocoon. I lay there in the absolute dark and quiet of the room. The blankets had my arms pinned to my sides. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t see. It was like being a thousand miles under the ocean with the immense weight of it pressing down on my chest.

But I wasn’t afraid. I was relieved. Finally, after all my running, I had arrived at the place I was meant to be, at home, at peace, in the nothingness and the dark and the cold.

The door opened and Jenny was at my side again, leaning over me.

Was it hours later? Days? I didn’t know. I couldn’t see her, just feel her arms digging under my shoulders and lifting me up.

I groaned, struggling against her touch, trying to keep still. “I’m fine. Leave me alone.”

“Stephen, you’re freezing to death. Now move!”

Jenny managed to get me up from the bed and out of the room, shoring me up with her shoulder and driving me down a long hallway. I couldn’t fight. I faltered along beside her, my legs stiff and awkward as a foal’s. We moved deeper into the casino toward a distant light. A fire. Jenny had built it in the center of a tiled atrium. Its smoke twisted upward to the shattered remains of a skylight.

She dropped me within inches of it. Its brilliance made my eyes ache, but I couldn’t feel its warmth. It reached out but couldn’t touch me. Jenny wrestled me up into a sitting position and arranged the blankets over my shoulders. I tried to push her away, but I was too weak. All I wanted to do was lie down. All I wanted was to sleep, to be in the quiet and alone in that black nothingness, but Jenny wouldn’t let me go.

There was a crash somewhere out in the casino, then the sound of shattering glass. Jenny stiffened. Dad’s knife appeared in her fist as she crouched beside me like an animal, peering into the dark, listening for more.

“There’s no one out there,” I said thoughtlessly, my head lolling onto my chest.

“Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Will and them aren’t done with us. They could still come.”

“They’re dead.”

Jenny’s eyes left the empty dark and fell back on me.

“What? Who’s dead?”

I looked up from the tiled floor. Jenny’s face, streaked with ash and pockmark burns, was framed in fire.

“Everyone,” I said, my voice rising up from the deep in a cold rasp. “Marcus. Violet. Dad. My mom. Even you and me. We thought the Collapse was over but it’s not. It just keeps going. It doesn’t matter where we go or what we do. We’re all dead. All of us. We just don’t know it yet.”

Jenny said nothing. She eased down beside me, bringing her body alongside mine. She brushed my hair aside with the tips of her fingers. When I flinched away from the warmth of her lips on my cheek, she wrapped her arms tight around me and leaned me in toward the fire, rocking us back and forth.

The heat from the fire pounded against my skin, but it was useless. My body was a gate of iron and I would not let it pass.

All that night, she left my side only to get more wood for the fire or to dart out into the darkness to check on the crashes and groans that seemed to be our constant companions. She was sure that each one was Will or Caleb or some faceless mob with torches in hand, ready to burn us down. But each time it was simply the old building settling into the brunt of winter. Broken glass. Creaking walls.

“We can’t stay here,” she said.

It had stopped snowing. A thin, watery light began to show through the clouds. The first traces of dawn.