Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

“Stephen, Jenny, Jackson — step away from there!”

The three of us whipped around to see Marcus and Sam and about ten others appear on the field behind us. Each of them had a gun trained on the people from Fort Leonard, who in turn raised theirs with a metallic clatter. The man with the patch had his gun out now and was pointing it right in Marcus’s face. The chrome hammer was drawn all the way back.

“Stephen,” Marcus said slowly, “take Jenny and Jackson and move out of the way.”

I swallowed hard. “They’re not here to fight,” I said.

“Stephen.”

I turned to the man with the patch. “Are you?”

The man tightened his grip on the revolver.

“They killed two friends of ours. We will fight if we need to, son.”

“Tell them it was an accident,” Jenny pleaded.

“Just get out of the way!”

I turned away from Marcus and back to Fort Leonard’s leader.

“It was my fault,” I said. “Okay? It was a dumb prank. I made everyone here think your people were attacking us and that’s why they sent the group that shot your friends. So if you want to shoot someone, then shoot me, but we’re telling you the truth. The ones who sent the people who killed your friends, the ones who hired the slavers, are not in charge anymore. I swear they’re not.”

The man with the patch considered this as we all held our breath.

“Look,” I said, as steady as I could, “the people who came before us nearly destroyed the whole world, but that was yesterday. This is today, and today we’ve got a choice, right?”

The group from Fort Leonard gripped the stocks of their guns like they were trying to keep their heads above water. If the wind blew wrong, they’d fire. And if they did, Marcus and his people would too.

“Marcus,” I said, “have everybody put their guns down.”

“Them first,” Marcus said. “We’re not—”

“Just do it,” Jackson commanded, turning around to face his father. “You’ve come this far. Just go one step further.”

Marcus gripped the rifle to his shoulder, sweat cutting channels through the soot on his face.

Jenny took a step toward him. “Please, Dad,” she said, and reached out to lay her palm over his rifle’s sight.

Painfully slow, Marcus lowered the barrel of his rifle, keeping his eyes on the people from Fort Leonard the entire time, looking for any hint they were about to take advantage. When they didn’t, he lowered his gun all the way and then motioned for Sam and the others to do the same.

Jenny turned to the man with the patch. “Now you.”

The man looked back at his people and gave a slight nod. All around us gun barrels wilted and fell until we stood there, two divided fronts without a war to fight.

Marcus took a tentative step forward and held out his hand.

“Marcus Green,” he said.

The man holstered his revolver, then lifted his own hand to take Marcus’s.

“Stan Allison.”

The two stood silently for a moment. Marcus looked back over his shoulder at the smoke rising above the trees.

“If you all could spare it,” he said, “we could really use some help.”

Stan nodded, then waved his people forward. Marcus and Sam and the others from Settler’s Landing led the way, but soon the people from Fort Leonard had caught up. They all mixed together, one side indistinguishable from the other as they marched toward the fires.

We watched them go, then Jenny took my hand and Jackson’s, and once we gathered up the little ones, we followed them back to town, all of us hoping there would be something left.

It was a Saturday, but there I was anyway, sitting at the edge of Tuttle’s new desk, a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in my hand, facing a crowd of kids who were looking up at me expectantly.

“Who wants to read the next chapter?”

Everyone’s hand shot up, everyone’s except Claudia’s, of course. She was a small girl with long blond hair and freckles. She almost never spoke in class and seemed paralyzed by shyness. Tuttle said that sometimes you have to force them to do what they need to do.

“Claud? How about you read some to us?”

The little girl shook her head vehemently. I left the edge of the desk and sat down on the dirt floor beside her, slipping the book into her lap and leaning in close to her ear.

“How about you just read it to me?”

Claudia’s blue eyes shone as she sucked back the fear.

“It’s okay,” I said, nudging her shoulder with mine. “Go ahead.”

Claudia lifted the book up off her lap. Her first words came out in a halting trickle. There were snickers and I threw out some hard glares to silence them. She stumbled over the next three words, then let the book fall into her lap.

“Claud…”

The book fell to the floor and she ran out — crying, I was sure. Great.

“Eddie, can you pick it up?”

Eddie, the oldest in the bunch, nodded, and I went off to find Claudia. I left the log cabin schoolhouse we had built on the site of the old school and walked out into the grassy field. It amazed me that, even months later, I could still smell the smoke.

I had been doing the little ones’ Saturday classes for the last month or so while Tuttle healed from his broken arm and smoke inhalation. He did the weekday classes himself, gasping and wheezing, but he said the weekends were too much. I was hesitant at first, but once I got into it, I found that there was something strangely comforting about being in the new school and, despite what Jackson and the others thought, the little ones were actually kind of fun.

I found Claudia out under the big sycamore tree at the top of the hill, her chin in her hands. Across from her, a crew of twenty or so people raised the roof on one of what was going to be a few new cabins behind the school. Claudia was lying on her stomach, staring not at the construction but at what lay beside it.

Twenty-three wooden crosses.

They were set out in neat rows in the grass, most of them surrounded by bouquets of wildflowers, cards, or keepsakes of the person who lay beneath them. Twenty had died that night, along with three injured who followed soon after. Claudia’s dad was there. Her brother too. Her mother had died years before.

“Hey,” I said, landing nearby.

“Hey,” Claudia said, pulling at the grass and tossing it aside.

“You okay?”

The little girl nodded, her pigtails swinging. “I don’t know why we have to come here on Saturday too.”

“Makes you one day smarter.”

“My mom told me when she was little they had Saturdays and Sundays off.”

“It’s a brave new world.”

“What does that mean?”

I picked a strand of grass and twirled it around my finger. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Something Tuttle says.”

“Are you gonna teach us when Mr. Tuttle dies?”

“Jeez, Claud.”

“Well?”

“I’m pretty sure Mr. Tuttle will live forever. Like a vampire.”

Claudia laughed, and I figured this was my chance. I reached around to my back pocket and threw my own copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory down in front of her. She leaned back from it like it was diseased.

“I think you’ll like it,” I said.

“But… why?” Claudia asked, looking out at the graves. “I mean, it’s not even real.”

I searched for something Tuttle might have said then, but found nothing. I looked from the graveyard up to the roof as it was carefully nailed into place by a work crew that was half Settler’s Landing and half Fort Leonard, distinctions that were fading more and more by the day.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess… maybe it makes you realize that other worlds are possible.”