The Eleventh Plague

TWO

We clawed our way out of our sleeping bags just before sunrise, greeted each other with sleepy-eyed grumbles, and got to work.

I dealt with Dad’s backpack first, making sure the waterproof bag inside was intact before loading in our first-aid kit and the few matches we had left. I did it carefully, still half expecting to hear Grandpa’s voice explode behind me as he wrenched the bag out of my hand and showed me how to do it right. I paused. Breathed. He’s gone, I told myself. I reached back in and felt for our one photograph, making sure it was still there, like I did every morning, and then moved on.

As I arranged the clothes in my pack, my hand hit the spine of one of my books. The Lord of the Rings. I had found it years before in a Walmart, buried underneath a pile of torn baby clothes and the dry leaves that had blown in when the walls had fallen. I’d read it start to finish six times, always waiting until after Grandpa went to sleep. He’d said the only thing books were good for was kindling.

I flipped through the book’s crinkled pages and placed it at the very top of the bag so it would be the first thing my fingers touched when I reached inside. Doing this gave me a rebel thrill. I didn’t have to worry about Grandpa finding it now.

When I went to water our donkey, Paolo, I found Dad staring down at something in the back of the wagon — Grandpa’s hunting rifle. It was lying right where he’d left it two days earlier, when he’d become too weak to lift it anymore.

Dad reached down and ran the tips of his fingers along the rifle’s scarred body.

“So … this is mine now.”

He lifted the rifle into his arms and slid the bolt back. One silver round lay there, sleek and deadly. “Guess so,” I said.

Dad forced a little smile as he hung the rifle from his shoulder. “I’ll have to figure out how to work it, then, huh?” he joked, a dim twinkle in his eye. “Come on, pal. Let’s get out of here.”

As Dad started down the trail, I turned for a last look at Grandpa’s grave. How many such mounds had we seen as we walked from one end of the country to the other, year after year? Sometimes it was one or two at a time, scattered like things misplaced. Sometimes there were clusters of hundreds, even thousands, littering the outskirts of dead cities.

It was still hard to believe his death could have come so quickly. After all that he had survived — the war, the Collapse, the chaos that followed — to be taken by … what? An infection? Pneumonia? The flu? We had no idea. He was like a thousand-year-old oak, scarred and twisted, that was somehow chopped down in a day. It made me feel sick inside, but some part of me was glad. Like we had been freed.

I was about to ask if Dad wanted to make some kind of marker before we left, but he had already moved down the trail.

“Come on, P,” I said, tugging on Paolo’s lead and guiding him away.

The sun rose as we moved off the hill, pushing some of the chill out of the air. We passed the mall and crossed a highway. On the other side there was a church with the blackened wreck of an army truck sitting in front of it. Beside that were tracts of abandoned houses, their crumbling walls and smashed windows reminding me of row after row of skulls.

It was almost impossible to imagine the lives of the people who’d lived and worked in these places before the Collapse. The war had started five years before I was born, and over nothing, really. Dad said a couple of American students backpacking in China were caught where they shouldn’t have been and mistaken for spies. He said it wouldn’t have been that big a deal, except that at around the same time the oil was running out, and the Earth was getting warmer, and a hundred other things were going wrong. Dad said everyone was scared and that fear had made the world into a huge pile of dried-out tinder — all it needed was a spark. Once the fire caught it didn’t take more than a couple years to reduce everything to ruins. All that survived were a few stubborn stragglers like us, holding on by our fingernails.

We made it through what was left of the town, then came to a wide run of grass, framed by trees with leaves that had begun to turn from vivid shades of orange and red to muddy brown. We shifted east, then dropped into the steady pace we’d maintain until it was time to jog south for the final leg.

“We’re gonna be fine,” Dad said, finally breaking the silence of the morning. “You know that, right?”

The knot from the previous night tightened in my throat. I swallowed it away and said that I did.

“The haul isn’t too bad,” Dad continued, glancing back at the wagon, which was filled with a few pieces of glass and some rusted scrap metal. “And hey, who knows? Remember the time we came across that stash of Star Wars stuff in — where was it? Columbus? Maybe we’ll wake up tomorrow morning and find, I don’t know, a helicopter. In perfect working order! Gassed up and ready to go!”

“Casey’d probably like that more than a bunch of old Star Wars toys.”

“Well, who knew the little nerd preferred Battlestar Galactica?”

Casey, or General Casey as he liked to call himself, was the king of the Southern Gathering. His operation sat at the top of what was once called Florida and was where Dad and I traded whatever salvage we could find for things like clothes and medicine and bullets.

“We still got ten pairs of socks out of it,” I said. “How many do you think we could get for a helicopter?”

“What? Are you kidding? We wouldn’t trade it!”

“Not even for socks?”

“Hell no. We’d become freelance helicopter pilots! Imagine what people would give us to take a ride in the thing.” Dad shot his fist in the air. “It’d be a gold mine, I tell ya!”

Dad laughed and so did I. It was a little forced, but I thought maybe it was like a promise, a way to remind ourselves that things would be okay again soon.

It grew warmer as the morning passed. Around noon we settled onto a dilapidated park bench and pulled out our lunch of venison jerky and hardtack. Paolo munched nearby, the metal bits of his harness tinkling gently.

Dad grew quiet. He took a few bites and then stared west, into the woods. Once I was done eating I pulled a needle and thread out of my pack and set to fixing a tear in the elbow of my sweatshirt.

“You should eat,” I said, drawing the needle through the greasy fabric and pulling it tight.

“Not hungry, I guess.”

A flock of birds swarmed across the sky, cawing loudly before settling on the power lines that ran like a seam down our path. I wondered if they had been able to do that before the Collapse, back when electricity had actually moved through the wires. And if not, which brave bird had been the first one to give it a shot once the lights had all gone out?

Distracted, I let the needle lance into my fingertip. I recoiled and sucked on it until the blood stopped. I heard Grandpa’s raspy voice. Pay attention to what you’re doing, Stephen. It doesn’t take a genius to concentrate. I leaned back over the sleeve, trying to keep the stitches tight like Mom had taught me.

“I keep expecting to see him,” Dad said. “Hear him.”

I pulled the thread to a stop and looked over my shoulder at Dad.

“Was he different?” I asked. “Before?”

Dad leaned his head back and peered up into the sky.

“On the weekends he’d take me to the movies. He worked a lot so that was our time together. We’d see everything. Didn’t matter what. Stupid things. It wasn’t about the movie, it was about us being there. But then everything fell apart and your grandma died … I guess he didn’t want to live through that pain again so he became what he thought he had to become to keep the rest of us alive.”

Even though it was still fairly warm out, Dad shivered. He wrapped his coat and his arms tight around his body, then stared at the ground and shook his head.

“I’m so sorry, Steve,” he said, a tired quiver in his voice. “I’m sorry I ever let him —”

“It’s okay,” I said.

I snapped the thread with my teeth and yanked on the fabric. It held. Good enough. I slipped the sweatshirt on and zipped it up. “You ready?”

Dad didn’t move. He was focused on a stand of reedy trees across the way, almost as though he recognized something in the deep swirl of twigs and dry leaves. When I looked all I saw was a rough path, barely wide enough for our wagon.

“You find that helicopter?”

Dad’s shoulders rose and fell and he let out a little puff of breath, the empty shape of a laugh.

“Better get going then, huh? We can start south here.”

There were heavy shadows, like smears of ash, under Dad’s red-rimmed eyes as he turned to me. For a second it was like he was looking at a stranger, but then he pulled his lips into a grin and slapped me on the knee.

“Reckon so, pardner,” he said as he lumbered up off the bench and hung the rifle on his shoulder once again. “Reckon it’s time to get on down the road.”

I took Paolo’s lead and gave it a pull. Dad hovered by the bench, staring back at the path west, almost hungrily, his thumb tucked under the rifle’s strap.

I stayed Paolo and waited. What was he doing?

But then, in a flash, it was gone, and Dad shook his head, pulling himself away from that other path and joining me. He ruffled my hair as he passed by, and we began what would be the last leg of our yearly trip south.

“Hey! Look at that.”

We were moving across a grass-covered plain. Dad was out front, facing west, shading his eyes from the glare. I stepped up next to him, but all I saw was a dark hill. It seemed out of place in the middle of the flat plain, but was otherwise unremarkable.

“What is it?” I asked.

Dad raised the rifle’s scope to his eye. “Well, it ain’t a helicopter,” he said as he handed me the rifle. “Looks like a bomber.”

“No. Really?” I lifted the rifle and peered through the scope. That’s what it was, all right. About forty feet tall. Whole, it probably would have been over a hundred and fifty feet long, but it was broken up into two sections at the wing, with a long section in back and a shorter one up front. The whole thing was covered in dirt, vines, and a mantle of rust.

The remnants of a cleared stand of trees lay between us and the plane. It looked like it had been cut down only a year or so ago. I figured that must have been why we hadn’t seen the plane the last time we’d come this way. How long had it been sitting there? Fifteen years? More?

I drew the scope down along the length of the plane, marveling at its size, until I came to the tail where I could make out a big white star.

“It’s American,” I said, lowering the rifle.

Dad nodded. “B-88,” he said. “Probably heading to Atlanta. Or Memphis. I don’t think it crashed, though — it’s pretty intact. Looks like it tried to land and failed. Must have been forced down somehow.”

I waited for him to make the next move, but he went silent after that, staring at it. Adults were always weird when it came to talking about the Collapse. Embarrassed, I thought, like kids caught breaking something that wasn’t theirs.

“Well … we better check it out. Right?”

“Guess we better. Come on.”

We got to the plane about an hour later. The two halves sat just feet from each other, like pieces of a cracked egg. The plane’s wings were hunched over and crumpled. A bright bloom of flowers had grown up around them, taking root and shining purple in the sun.

I led Paolo over to where he could munch on some flowers and followed Dad to the opening. The plane had split in two just behind the cockpit, which was closed off with loads of twisted metal. To our right was the empty bomb bay. I leaned in, squinting past the wreckage. It was bright at the mouth of the steel cave, but toward the back it grew dark enough that I could only make out a jumble of broken metal covered with dirt and vines and weeds.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t look like there’s anything here. Maybe we should —”

“It’s gonna be fine,” Dad said. “We’ll make it quick. In and out, okay?”

“We’ll need the flashlight.”

Dad tugged at the end of his beard, then nodded. I pulled the light off the back of the wagon and rejoined him. There was a narrow catwalk that led alongside the bomb bay to the back of the plane. Dad stepped up onto it and shuffled crablike down its length. I crept along behind him until we came to the remains of a steel bulkhead separating the compartments. It had been mostly torn away, but we still had to crouch down low to get through it.

It was humid inside, and musty smelling. I slapped the flashlight on its side until its beam ran down the length of the plane.

The back section was lined with a series of workstations, alcoves where I imagined soldiers performing their various duties. All that was left of them were welded-in steel shelves and short partitions. All the chairs, electronics, and wiring had been ripped out long ago by people like us. Vines crept up the walls and hung from the ceiling. Every so often some rusty metal lump emerged from underneath the plants, like the face of someone drowning.

“Why would it have been going to Atlanta?” I asked, hoping to drive the eerie silence out of the air. Dad’s answer didn’t help.

“P Eleven.”

I shivered as he said it.

“We tried to quarantine the big cities, but the people inside didn’t want to be cooped up with the sick, so the government decided to burn them out.”

“They bombed their own people?”

“Didn’t see any other choice, I guess. If it got out … ‘Course, in the end it didn’t matter. Got out anyway.”

After that first spark the war escalated fast. It was only a few months before the United States launched some of its nukes at China and its allies. P11H3 was what China came back with. Everybody just called it P11 or the Eleventh Plague. It was nothing more than a souped-up strain of the flu, but it ate through the country like wildfire, infecting and then killing nearly everyone it touched. The last reliable news anyone heard before the stations went off the air said it had killed hundreds of millions in the United States alone.

I cleared my throat to chase out the shakes. We had to stay focused on the task. The faster we got done, the faster we’d be on our way. “See anything worthwhile?” I called out.

Dad appeared in the beam of my flashlight, blocking the light out of his eyes with his hand. “Looks like it’s been pretty picked over already. Let’s check farther back.”

We rummaged through the rubble but only found the remains of some seats and a few crumbling logbooks. There were lockers along the walls but they were rusted shut or empty. Useless. It was as though we were wandering through the remains of a dinosaur, picking through its bones.

“Last of its kind,” Dad said, patting the wall. “These things went into production right before the Collapse.”

The Collapse followed in the wake of P11. With so few people left alive, everything just shut down. Factories. Hospitals. The government. The military crumbled. Power stations blew one by one until the electricity went out countrywide. It was like America had been wired up to one big switch and the Eleventh Plague was the hand that reached up and clicked it all off. Millions more must have died in the darkness and neglect that followed.

“See anything?” Dad asked.

I shook my head. “Nah. Let’s get out of here, okay?”

“All right, all right.” Dad patted my shoulder as we started back for the bulkhead. “Hey, what’s that?”

“What?”

Dad knelt down by a metal locker at my feet. It was partially hidden under the overhang of one of the workstations, right by a small crack in the plane’s skin that let in a finger of sunlight. Dad pushed a cover of weeds and dirt out of the way.

“It’s just an old locker,” I said. “If there was anything in it, someone would have taken it already.”

“Maybe they didn’t see it. Come here and give me a hand.”

I looked up through the bulkhead to the open air outside. We were so close. “It’s rusted shut. We’ll never get it open.”

“We can’t get careless when it comes to salvage, Stephen,” Dad snapped. “Now come on. Pull on it when I do, okay? On three. One. Two. Pull!”

We threw our backs into it and, surprising both of us, the lid screeched loudly and popped off, throwing us on our butts with a heavy thud.

“Ha! See? Me and you, kid, we can do anything!” Dad pulled himself back up and leaned over the open locker, rubbing his palms together. “So, what’ve we got here?”

At first glance it wasn’t much. Dad handed back a thick blue blanket that was worth keeping. There was a moment of excitement when he found stacks of prepackaged military rations, but they were torn up and past their prime. Worthless.

“Okay. Can we go now?”

“In a second. We —” Dad froze, his eyes going wide. “Oh my God.” I scrambled to join him. “What? What is it?” He reached deep into the locker and struggled with something I couldn’t see.

“Dad?”

His back flexed and he managed to lift whatever it was into the light.

“What is —”

It was a metal can. Not one of the little ones we used to find lining the shelves of abandoned grocery stores, but a big one. Forty-eight ounces at least. Dad turned it around so that the light shone on the label. It read, simply, in black letters: PEARS.

“Fruit,” Dad said, his voice thick with awe. “Good Lord, it’s canned fruit. Jesus, how long has it been?”

Two years at least. Dad had saved a can of pears for my thirteenth birthday. Since then if we had fruit, it was a runty crab apple or a nearly juiceless orange. My stomach cramped and my mouth watered at the memory of those pears and the sweet juice they sat in.

Dad set the can down between us, then scrambled into his back pocket for the can opener. He was about to crack it open when my hand shot out and snatched his wrist.

He looked up at me, his eyes looking almost crazed. “Steve —”

“We can’t.”

“What do you mean, we can’t?”

“What would Casey give us for this?”

“Stephen,” Dad laughed. “Look, I don’t know, but —”

“We have nothing in that wagon out there. Could we get bullets? New clothes? Batteries for the flashlight?”

“But …” Dad scrambled for a defense, but nothing came. His eyes dropped to the can opener, considering it a moment before his hand went limp and it clattered onto the floor.

“I mean … we have to be smart,” I said. “Right?”

Dad nodded once, looking exhausted.

“You’re just like your grandfather,” he said.

It hit me like a hammer in the chest. Before I knew what I was doing, I grabbed the can opener and stabbed its blade into the can, working it around. Dad tried to stop me, but before he could, I had the lid off and was tossing it aside. I dug my hand in and pulled out a fat slice of pear, holding it up into the narrow beam of light. It glistened like a jewel. Perfect and impossible.

I paused, my heart pounding.

“Go ahead,” Dad urged. “Take it.”

The flesh of the pear snapped in my mouth when my teeth hit it. There was an explosion of juice, so much of it and so sweet. I chewed slowly, savoring it, then dug my hand in the can and shoved a slice at Dad before taking another for myself. We devoured them, all of them, grunting with pleasure. There was still some part of me, some tiny voice in the back of my head, screaming that it was wrong, but I kept stuffing pears into my mouth until the mean, raspy voice receded.

We ate all the pears and split the juice inside, then we lay back, our bellies full and our mouths and hands sticky with sweet juice. Dad had this happy, dazed look on his face, and I was sure that he, like me, was replaying the moment over and over again in his head, committing the feel of the fruit in his mouth and its sweetness to memory.

I lifted the empty can into the flashlight beam. Its dusty sides were splattered with congealing syrup. Stray pieces of flesh clung to the insides. Empty, it was as light as air. The dazed excitement of the pears began to fade, and some dark, clammy thing took its place, creeping through me. The sweetness of the pears turned bitter. My mouth ached. In an hour or two we’d be hungry again, the memory of the fruit would fade, and we’d still need clothes, bullets, batteries, and food. Winter would still be coming. I could hear Grandpa’s voice as clearly as if he was sitting right next to me. Stupid. Wasteful.

I wished I could smash the can to pieces on the floor, tear it apart, the metal shards slicing up my hands as punishment for being so thoughtless.

“Where are you going?”

I had climbed out of the plane and was walking down to the end of one flower-covered wing. It had grown darker while we were inside. A curtain of dirty gray clouds blocked out the sun and there was a thick tingling in the air.

“Stephen?”

I picked one of the flowers off the wing’s edge and rolled it around in my hand. It left a purple smear of blood on my fingertips. “We should get moving,” I said.

The rusty skin of the plane flexed as Dad leaned against it behind me.

“You ever wonder what’s out there?” he asked.

When I turned around, he had his hands stuffed in his pockets and was looking over his shoulder to the west, just as casual as you please. A small range of mountains hung over the woods, gray and misty-looking in the distance.

“I always think maybe there’s, like, some quiet place. Somewhere you could build a little house. Hunt. Fish.” A dreamy grin drifted across his face. “Maybe even somewhere we could find other people like us.”

I kicked at the dirt. “Find slavers maybe. Red Army. US Army. Bandits.”

“We’ve stayed out of their way before.”

I shot a sharp look across the space between us. Was he really talking about this? Leaving the trail? I tossed the flower into the grass and worked it into the ground with the toe of my boot.

“We should get going,” I said, “and cover some more ground before dark.” I tried to push past him so I could gather Paolo, but Dad stopped me, his palm flat in the center of my chest. I looked straight across at him. Now that I was fifteen, I was nearly as tall as he was.

“Listen, it’s just you and me now, Steve. Maybe this is our chance.”

“Our chance for what?”

“A life. A home.”

Our nearly empty wagon and all the miles we still had to cover that day loomed just over Dad’s shoulder. I heard Grandpa’s voice, the ice-cold rasp of it, clear as day.

“This is our home.”

I knocked Dad’s hand off my chest and pushed past him, ducking back into the plane and through the bulkhead. My knees slammed into the dirt and rust, and I dug around for the flashlight and the can and its lid.

A quiet place. A home. It was a fantasy, same as the helicopter. Dad knew that as well as I did, so why would he even bring it up? What was he thinking? First it was the ring, then the pears, and now this.

I paused, feeling the bitterness of the words turning through my head. Was it true what he said? Was I like Grandpa? Part of me cringed at the thought, but who had kept us alive all these years?

“Stephen!”

What now? I hauled myself up and out of the plane to find Dad squinting off in the direction we’d come from. There was a puff of smoke rising into the air a few miles back.

“What’s going —?”

“Rifle,” he commanded. “Now!”

I snatched the rifle off the wagon. Dad raised the scope to his eye and tracked it north across the horizon until he found what he was looking for.

“People coming this way. With a vehicle.”

He was trying to be calm, but I knew the hitch he got in his voice when he was scared. No announcement could possibly have been worse. One of Grandpa’s absolute, unbreakable rules was that if we saw other people, people we didn’t know, we were to avoid them at all costs. Other people meant trouble. Other people with a working vehicle meant even more trouble.

“What do we do?” I asked, my heart pounding in my ears. “Run?”

“We’re on foot. They’d be on us in a second.”

“So what, then?”

In answer, Dad grabbed Paolo by his reins and drew him around to the opposite side of the plane, out of sight. He tied his lead to a jutting piece of metal and told me to get our backpacks. I grabbed them and followed Dad into the plane.

“All the way to the back,” he said, pushing us past the bomb bay and again through the bulkhead. We stumbled into the last of the stripped workstations and crouched down. We were hidden but still had a straight view through the bulkhead and to the rent in the plane ahead.

“We’ll wait them out,” Dad said, stuffing our packs behind us. “They’ll probably do just what we did — look around and head on their way.”

“But what if they don’t?”

“They will,” he insisted.

My chest seized with nerves. I knew he was only trying to make me feel better, but he was no surer than I was.

I swallowed hard. “You’re right,” I said. “You’re right. They will. They’ll just go right on by.”

But then it started to rain.