Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

I hated the idea but had to admit she was right. I agreed, and we trailed the two scouts from as far back as we could. They followed pretty much the same path Jenny and I had the other night. I thought they were making straight for the Henrys’ house, but before they reached it they cut around it and went farther east, disappearing into thick trees.

When their footprints finally petered out, we dropped down onto the snowy ground and crawled up to a fallen tree that lay at the edge of some brush. Voices came from the other side, a mix of languages and accents. We glanced at each other, then peeked over the edge of the tree.

Less than a hundred feet from where we lay was a camp made up of black tents arranged in precise rows. Twenty of them, at least. Men like the two scouts we’d seen milled around, bristling with as many weapons and as much ammunition as they could carry. A fire burned at the center of the camp, and behind it sat a central tent that was flanked by three large dark shapes that sat just outside of the firelight.

Jenny looked at me, but I shrugged, unable to tell what they were. The forest curved around the north edge of the camp, so Jenny and I pulled back from our hiding place and crawled until the three dark shapes became all too clear.

The one closest to us was a flatbed truck. On its back there was an immense metal canister with a hose running from one side of it. A fuel truck, I guessed, meant to service what sat next to it — two hulking black jeeps, their sides and fronts plated with armor and an open back where heavy machine guns were mounted on rotating tripods.

It was like looking at two prehistoric monsters. Both of us stared in awe, speechless at what was looming over Settler’s Landing as it quietly slept just a few miles away.

“How could Fort Leonard afford mercenaries?” I whispered. “Aren’t they smaller than Settler’s Landing?”

Before Jenny could answer, there was a commotion in the camp as the black flap of one of the central tents opened. Two figures walked out and everything inside of me froze.

No. It can’t be.

The black man’s dreadlocks were longer than the last time I’d seen him, and so was his beard. The white man with the scar seemed, if anything, bigger. There was no doubt who they were though. Their faces were seared into my memory.

Not mercenaries.

Slavers.

The air rushed out of me as I realized exactly what Fort Leonard would have offered them in exchange for ending the war once and for all. They offered them Marcus and Violet and Jackson. They offered them Tuttle and Martin and Derrick and Wendy. They offered them everyone and everything in Settler’s Landing.

“Stephen?” Jenny whispered.

She grabbed my arm and pulled me deeper into the forest, away from the camp. Once we couldn’t hear them anymore, we eased down the back side of a slope, pressing our backs into the snow.

“We’ll tell Marcus,” Jenny said. “Warn them. Maybe if they know what’s coming—”

I almost laughed. The thought that they had a chance against these people, that they could even risk that, was ridiculous.

“They’ll have to go,” I said. “All of them. Take what they can and leave.”

“Leave Settler’s Landing? They won’t. Marcus and Violet? They’d die first.”

My fists curled in on themselves. She was right. God, what had I started? Were they here because of me too? Had they come looking for me and Dad and found Fort Leonard instead?

We sat there, a moat of empty space between us. Jenny chewed on her thumbnail, staring at the ground. We both knew what was coming.

I had seen it in the belly of that plane and she had seen it in a mass of men with their guns and their wild, hungry looks.

“It’s not our fault,” Jenny said. “What we did was stupid, but it was Caleb who went to Fort Leonard. Not us. He started this.”

I murmured something in agreement, but I didn’t believe it and I knew Jenny didn’t either.

A light snow began to fall again, whipping through the trees and tapping against our shoulders. A laugh, loud and throaty, rose from the slave traders’ camp. It was like the grunting of an animal ready to hunt.

I took Jenny’s hand and we fled through the woods.

Violet and Marcus were at the kitchen table when we arrived. Violet was at one end, knitting distractedly, while Marcus leaned grimly over a mug of tea.

“What is it?” Violet asked.

Before I could speak, Jackson came thundering down the stairs. I felt a flash of happiness to see him again but as soon as he saw me and Jenny, he stopped where he was, grasping the rail and eyeing us sharply.

“What are they doing here?”

The way he spat it out, I knew instantly that Marcus told him everything about our raid on the Henrys’. How we had started all of this. My mouth went dry. I felt sick. Ashamed.

“Come sit down, Jackson,” Violet said. “Stephen and Jenny say they have something to tell us.”

Jackson crept down the stairs, then took a seat at the far end of the kitchen table. He didn’t look at me and I found I couldn’t look at any of them. How could I? I’d abandoned Jackson, stolen from Violet, and betrayed Marcus and everyone else in the town. “Well, Stephen?” Violet said.

They all sat there watching us. Waiting. I clasped Jenny’s hand under the table and told them about the slavers that Fort Leonard had hired. The jeeps. The weapons. That they were the same ones my Dad and I had fought. Everything.

When I was done, Marcus rubbed his hand over the thick collection of stubble on his chin.

“Slavers,” Marcus said carefully. “You’re sure?”

I nodded. “I’m sure.”

Marcus looked across the table at Violet, but she stared down into her lap, all the color drained from her face.

“I know you don’t want to leave,” I said. “But you don’t know what these people will do. They—”

“They won’t do anything,” Jenny interrupted.

I turned to where Jenny sat beside me.

“What do you mean? Of course they—”

But Jenny wasn’t looking at me. She was focused on her parents. Her parents, who wouldn’t meet her gaze.

“Will they?” Jenny asked, holding the words out like bait. Marcus and Violet said nothing. Jackson didn’t move.

“I don’t…”

And then I got it. I saw what Jenny saw.

Ever since the night of our raid on the Henrys’, they should have been expecting the forces of Fort Leonard to arrive at any moment. But if they did, then why was Violet sitting at the table knitting? Shouldn’t she have been preparing for the coming fight? Shouldn’t Marcus’s rifle be close at hand instead of sitting in its rack on the wall?

And when I told them that a small army of slave traders was bearing down on them, they didn’t seem scared. They didn’t pack up. They didn’t flee town.

Most of all, they didn’t seem surprised.

I felt something like a barbed hook sinking into my gut and in that instant I knew.

Fort Leonard didn’t hire the slavers.

They did.

“Caleb told us they were mercenaries,” Marcus said, looking down into his tea. “Ex-soldiers. I don’t know where he found them. He said they’d run the people at Fort Leonard off so they wouldn’t come back. That’s all. He said no one would get hurt.”

“What are you supposed to do for them?” Jenny asked.

“They want to expand west. Caleb said we’d be like a way station. Nothing more. They’d store fuel here, food. He didn’t tell us they were slavers, I swear.”

“When does it happen?”

“Tonight. Sundown. We’re supposed to meet them at the gates and then we all go together.”

“We have to talk to Caleb,” Violet said. “Now.”