Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

I arranged the bits of wood and kindling I’d found but paused before lighting them up. We were on fairly open land. The smoke would go up like a beacon, visible to anyone for miles around, but I didn’t see a choice. The wet and chill could kill us.

The fire I got going was smoky at first, but finally a decent flame started. I stripped off my clothes, then Dad’s, and hung them from a crack in the rock wall by the fire to dry. I huddled up as close as I could to the flames. It was amazing how much difference being warm made. I cleaned and loaded the rifle until the stars emerged and spread across the sky.

It was quiet then, just the crackle of the fire and the soft ripple of the dwindling river below. The world felt enormous and as empty as a dry well. In my mind I ran through a picture show of campsites we had stayed in over the years: the mall in Virginia, the gas station in South Carolina. I finally settled on the cracked parking lot of a Kroger supermarket in Georgia. The last time we’d been there, years ago, daisies had begun to burst through the concrete. I imagined there were fields of them now. I saw myself unpacking our camp, laying out our bedrolls, and gathering wood for a fire while Dad fed Paolo and then got our dinner together, humming as he did it.

I sat for a while in that fantasy until darkness began to seep into the picture around the edges and I felt low and cold. My clothes were mostly dry by then so I dressed and turned to Dad, his clothes in hand. When I saw him there, still and broken on that rock, it was like a wave hit me out of nowhere.

Why did we have to help those people? You said nothing would change. You promised!

I snapped my left hand closed, urging my fingers deep into the half-moons. A sharp thrill of pain shot up my arm and chased the thoughts away, clearing my head. Blood ran down my hand, but I didn’t care. The pain was a relief. It was easier.

My head fell back against the rock and my eyes closed. I was exhausted but I wouldn’t let sleep come. What now? I thought. I had supplies. Dad seemed stable, but I couldn’t feed him or give him water. I looked up at the gorge wall, black against the gray night sky, and my heart thrummed against my chest.

I have to get us out of here. But how?

After I got Dad dressed again I reached behind me and drew his arm over my head and down across my chest, holding on to it tightly, nestling my head into the crook of his elbow. I sat that way for a long time, shivering, until my eyes closed and I slipped off into sleep before I could stop it.

I don’t know how long I slept, but it seemed like only minutes before I snapped awake to a soft shuffling sound from above us. I closed my eyes, trying to listen past the crackling of the fire.

Footsteps on the ridge above us.

Men. Four, maybe five, creeping along the shore of the river downstream with one on the ridge. They were moving slowly and not talking.

My hand fell to the stock of the rifle.

Slavers.

Of course. Grandpa had told me a hundred times. Fuel was incredibly scarce so people who had vehicles never went far from the central place where they stored it. Dad and I had wandered right into the slavers’ territory, stirred up a hornet’s nest, and didn’t even know it.

Seeing no other choice, I left Dad for an outcropping of rock a few feet upstream. I was too exposed with him. From where I was, I had a good view down the gorge and, since the fire was still going, anyone coming from downstream would be distracted by it and not see me. I pulled my boots on and checked the rifle. One round in the chamber and six more in the magazine. Despite the years of attempted training by Grandpa, I knew I wasn’t a very good shot. I aimed the rifle downstream and waited, hoping that I could at least scare them off.

The men in the gorge materialized out of the darkness. Three of them. Creeping shadows, sweeping their guns back and forth. My hands grew slick on the rifle’s stock. The cuts on my palm stung.

The man in the middle stepped into the outer circle of our firelight. He knelt down next to my backpack and started to go through it, balancing his shotgun on his knee, finger on the trigger. He wasn’t one of the two from the plane. He was older, Dad’s age maybe. The two others stayed hidden in the shadows behind him. After the man went through my bag, he looked to his left and that’s when he saw Dad. He signaled to his friends, then brought his shotgun to his shoulder and crept toward the cave. The other two followed.

I brought my rifle over the lip of the outcropping. Icy sweat was pouring down my face and arms. The leader of the slavers set his gun down and reached out toward Dad. I had his back squarely in my sights, but I was paralyzed, too afraid, too uncertain, to act. I was seven years old again, on my knees before the great brown bulk of that bear, waiting for someone to appear and make it all go away.

But then there was a voice in the back of my head. Dad’s.

You’re not seven years old anymore, it said, and you’re not helpless.

The pounding in my chest slowed. Suddenly everything seemed clear. I clicked the rifle’s safety with my thumb, then stood up behind the rock and squeezed the trigger twice. My ears rang as the shots echoed off the canyon walls. The bullets slammed into the dirt inches from the leader’s feet.

The three men jerked away from Dad, the man in the middle yelling at them all to run. He and one of the others scrambled into the shadows along the wall of the valley, but the third one, a tall skinny one with a flash of yellow hair, stepped forward and raised his rifle. I fired. I was sure I’d missed until I saw his leg buckle and he went down. Winged him. Just enough. He staggered back to the shadows but collapsed before he made it there, hitting the ground right behind the fire.

Shots came from my left, over by where the other two had ducked into the shadows. One bullet struck the wall behind me, sending a rain of gravel down over my head, and the other slammed into the dirt in front of me. I dropped down behind the rock. “Jackson, no!”

I raised the rifle just as someone came out of the darkness downstream, running to the man on the ground, a rifle in his hand. I leveled the scope. His face was round, unlined, beardless, and framed in a tangle of reddish curls. The ground beneath me pulled away and I went icy inside.

My God. He’s younger than me.

Sand crunched behind me.

I spun around. The last thing I saw was the wooden stock of a rifle flying toward the side of my head.

“I don’t care what Caleb Henry would say.”

“Marcus—”

“He’s just a kid, Sam. He’s not a damn spy.”

I woke up the next morning to voices I didn’t recognize. My head was pounding. My hands and feet were tied with lengths of rope. Three men were standing by the side of the stream with their heads down, talking low and passing around a bottle of water. My rifle was on the other side of the camp near Dad, who was in his place at the mouth of the cave, unmoved. I shifted my weight quietly and sat up, my head swimming as I did it.

“How do you know that?”

“We’re half a day from home, Sam. If they’re spies, they’re the worst damn spies I’ve ever heard of. Besides, he could have killed Jackson and he didn’t. He had him in his sights.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“Look at them, Sam. What would Violet say? What would Maureen say, if she was still with us?”

They weren’t slavers, I was fairly sure. Farmers maybe, traders, or — who knew? — maybe even salvagers like me and Dad. The man who’d gone through my backpack the night before stood in the center of the group. He was compact, bald with a band of messy black and gray hair around the sides. Next to him was the man he called Sam, a black man in his fifties who wore a sweat-stained New York Yankees ball cap and had a heavy belly and a thick mustache.