The Eleventh Plague

ONE

I was sitting at the edge of the clearing, trying not to stare at the body on the ground in front of me. Dad had said we’d be done before dark, but it had been hours since the sun went down and he was still only waist deep in the hole, throwing shovelfuls of dirt over his shoulder.

Even though it was covered in the burlap shroud I could see how wasted Grandpa’s body was. He’d always been thin, but the infection had taken another ten pounds off him before he went. His hand fell out from a tear in the burlap. Shadowed from the moonlight, it was a desert plain, the tracks of the veins like dry riverbeds winding up the crags of his knuckles. A gold Marine Corps ring sat on one finger, but it barely fit anymore.

Dad’s shovel chewed through rocks and clay with an awful scrape. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and escaped into the thicket of trees that surrounded us, stumbling through the darkness until I came to the edge of the hill we were camped on.

Far below were the slouching ruins of an old mall. Rows of cars, rusting in the moist air, sat in the parking lot, still waiting for the doors to open. Beyond the mall, the arches of a McDonald’s sign hovered like a ghost.

I remembered seeing it for the first time, ten years ago. I was five and then the sign had towered in its red and gold plastic. It seemed gigantic and beautiful. One trillion served. Now fingers of vines crept up its base, slowly consuming more and more of the rusty metal.

I wondered how long it would be until they made it to the top and the whole thing finally collapsed. Ten years? Twenty? Would I be Dad’s age? Grandpa’s?

I took a breath of the cool air, but the image of Grandpa’s hand lying there on the ground loomed in the back of my mind. How could it be so still?

Grandpa’s hand only made sense in motion, rearing back, the gold ring flashing as it crashed into my cheek. He had so many rules. I could never remember them all. The simple act of setting up camp was a minefield of mistakes, and Dad and I both seemed to trip over every one. I could still feel the sting of the metal and the rasp of his calloused skin.

But that’s over, I told myself. We’re on our own now. Grandpa’s fist was just another bit of wreckage we were leaving behind.

“Stephen!”

My chest tightened. It wasn’t cold enough for a fire, but I didn’t want to go back with nothing to do so I collected an armful of wood and brush on the way. I dropped it all between our sleeping bags, then leaned over the tinder, scraping the two pieces of my fire starter together until a spark caught. Once I had a proper campfire, I sat back on my heels to watch it burn.

“Think it’s deep enough yet?”

Dad was leaning against the wall of the grave, his body slick with sweat and dirt. I nodded.

“Come on, then. Bring the ropes.”

Once I helped Dad out of the hole, we knelt on either side of Grandpa’s body and drew lengths of rope under his knees and back. Dad started to lift him, but I didn’t move. Grandpa’s hand, one finger crowned with gold, was only inches from me.

“What about his ring?”

The ends of the ropes went limp in Dad’s hands. The ring glinted in the firelight. I knew he stung from it just like I did.

“There’s gotta be a half ounce of solid gold there,” I said. “If not more.”

“Let’s just do this.”

“But don’t we have to —?”

“Stephen, now,” Dad snapped.

We lowered Grandpa into the grave and then, before I could even pull the ropes out, Dad began filling it in again. I knew I should stop him. We could have traded Grandpa’s ring for food, new clothes, even bullets. Dad knew that as well as I did.

When the grave was filled, the shovel slipped from Dad’s hands and he fell to his knees, doubling over with his arms around his stomach. His body seized with small tremors.

Oh God. Don’t let him be sick too.

I reached out to him. “Dad?”

When he turned, the light caught tears cutting channels through the dirt on his face. I turned toward the woods as he sobbed, giving him what privacy I could, a knot twisting tighter and tighter inside me. When he was done I laid his favorite flannel shirt over his shoulders. Dad drew it around him with a shaky breath, then searched the stars through red, swollen eyes.

“I swear,” he exhaled. “That man was a purebred son of a bitch.”

“Maybe we should put that on his tombstone.”

Dad surprised me with a short, explosive laugh. I sat beside him, edging my body alongside the steady in and out of his breath. He draped his arm, exhausted, over my shoulder. It felt good, but still the knot in my stomach refused to unravel.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, Steve?”

“We’ll be okay, won’t we? Without him?” When Dad said nothing I moved out from under his arm and looked up at him.

“I mean… nothing’s going to change. Right?”

Dad fixed his eyes past me and onto the dark trail we would start down the next morning.

“No,” he said, his words rising up like ghosts, thin and pale and empty. “Nothing’s ever going to change.”

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.

THREE

It came lightly at first, finger taps, barely noticeable, but within minutes it was a real storm. Rain slammed against the roof of the plane. Wind howled through it. We were crouched down behind the workstation, legs cramping and hearts pounding.

“Maybe they rode by us,” I said.

“Would you? In this?”

There was a flash of lightning and thunder that made both of us jump, and the rain seemed to double in power in an instant. Back where we were a steady but light spray of water squeezed through the tiny cracks in the airframe, but it was a waterfall up by the opening. Water crashed down in a bright curtain and coursed down the floor of the plane, pooling at our feet and surrounding us in a cold, oily muck. I peeked over the edge of the partition, pushing a wet strand of hair out of my face. My eyes had adjusted to the dimness and I could see the entrance to the plane clearly. Nothing there.

“It’s okay,” Dad said. “I think they really did go —” The waterfall split in two as the barrel of a black rifle pushed through and scanned the interior. I jerked back but Dad took my elbow, steadying me. We were about a hundred feet back and hidden. With the dark and the rain, it was a safe bet they couldn’t see or hear us. Still, my hands quaked as the rifle eased forward and two men came in behind it. One man held the rifle while the other followed with what I first thought were horse’s reins. As he stepped farther inside, I saw what was really at the other end.

The reins ran from the man’s hand to cuffs around the wrists of a boy and a woman, and then up to thick collars on their necks. The two captives moved with the fearful slowness of people who expected to be beaten.

“Slavers.” Dad spat it out, like the word itself was foul.

If there was any group we avoided the most, it was them. Some were ex-military, some were just brutal scum. We saw them skulking around the edges of the trade gatherings like a bad disease. They mostly kept to themselves, but as far as we knew, they ranged throughout the country taking whoever they could and selling them to scattered militia groups, the few surviving plantation owners down south, or even the Chinese.

The man with the reins pointed for them to go sit up against one wall, then tied the reins to the edge of the bomb bay. The woman and the boy never raised their heads to face him, never spoke, just shuffled to their places like broken animals. The slavers situated themselves in a dry spot in the bomb bay. One of the men pulled the cap off a flare and the entire plane exploded in a flash of red light. Dad and I ducked down behind the partition until the light lowered and we smelled the smoke of a small fire.

It was still dark where we were, so I took a chance and peeked around the edge of the partition. The men were gathered around their fire with a deck of cards and a bottle of liquor. Their clothes looked military to me. One was black with long dreadlocks and a thin beard. The other was white and immense, with bull-like shoulders and a jagged scar that ran from his temple down his cheek, disappearing at his jaw. It glowed pale in the firelight.

Dad was up on his knees beside me. His eyes were narrowed and his lips were a tense line, but it wasn’t the slavers he was watching.

The woman and the boy were illuminated by the ragged edge of the fire. It magnified the hollows of their eye sockets and the cruel thinness of their birdlike arms. The woman had scraggly hair and was wearing a short white dress that clung to her. She was so thin I could see the shadows of her ribs. The boy was smaller than me, barefoot, and wearing torn-up jeans and a filthy T-shirt. Across from them, the men drank and played cards, their laughter mixing with the driving rain and peals of thunder.

Dad was holding the rifle just below the edge of the partition, gripping it so tightly his knuckles were white as bone. His finger was on the trigger.

I grabbed his wrist. “We don’t get involved,” I whispered. “Grandpa said—”

“Grandpa is gone,” he hissed.

I glared down into the cold muck, my arms wound tightly around my chest. We needed to stay right there, still and quiet, until the rain passed and they were all gone. The woman. The boy. We didn’t know them. They weren’t our responsibility.

Dad pulled the rifle back and huddled behind the partition with me. “I’m not saying we fight them,” he whispered. “They’re drinking. We give them time to get drunk and pass out. When they do, we untie the woman and boy on our way out and let them go. That’s all.”

Dad’s hand fell on my shoulder, but I pushed it away.

“I know what Grandpa would say,” Dad said. “But we don’t have to be like him. Not if we don’t want to.”

I peeked around the dripping edge of the partition. The boy tried to squirm his way deeper into the crook of the woman’s arm, but since her hands were tied, she couldn’t comfort him. She let her head fall back against the wall. Her mouth hung open and she stared upward, blankly. The boy fell across his own knees, his spine sticking out like a range of knobby mountains.

A spark of anger flared inside me. If we had ignored the plane, or if we had just taken that can and gone, we would have been setting up camp miles from here. Dad would be cooking dinner and I’d be brushing Paolo, getting ready for the next day’s hike.

“Stephen…”

Anger was a compact burning thing in my stomach. I prayed he knew what he was doing.

I nodded. I couldn’t bring myself to speak. After that, all we could do was wait.

FOUR

Once the men fell asleep Dad and I slipped on our packs, then unfolded ourselves from behind the panel. It helped that the rain hadn’t slacked off. The constant thrumming echoed through the metal coffin of the plane, helping mask our movements.

We crept across the uneven floor, squeezed through the bulkhead, and emerged on the other side. As we moved into the firelight, the woman nearly gasped, but Dad held up his hands to show we were no harm. She glanced over at the sleeping men. For a second I thought she was going to warn them, but then she sat back and watched us through narrowed eyes. Dad slipped his hunting knife out of its sheath and handed it to me. Then he turned and leveled his rifle at the sleeping men.

As I approached, knife in hand, the boy woke with a start. His eyes were as big as lily pads. I put my finger to my lips to quiet him, then slipped the blade under his bonds and cut them. He rubbed his wrists and stared up at me blankly.

“They won’t let you get away with this,” the woman hissed. “They won’t let you take us.”

“We’re not taking you,” I said, sawing through the leather reins that bound them to the plane. “We’re freeing you.”

The woman actually laughed. It was a dreadful, breathy thing. “What do you expect us to do? Just run out into this storm? And then what?”

I glanced out the opening. The whole world was a gray mass of pounding rain and wind. She was right. They wouldn’t get far. And as weak as they looked, even if the slavers never caught up to them again, they were as good as dead. I turned to Dad. His brows furrowed as he searched the muck at his feet for an answer.

“But if we had their jeep…”

I turned. The woman was pointing to where the black man lay sprawled out by the dwindling fire. A ring of keys was clipped to one of his belt loops.

“If you really want to help us,” she said, “we need the keys.”

I shook my head. If she thought we were getting any closer to those men than we already were, she was insane. I was about to signal that we should go, but by the time I did, Dad was already slipping the rifle over his shoulder and crouching down into the mud.

“Dad, no.”

He waved me off. There was nothing else I could do. Any more and I’d wake them. I had to stand there and watch as Dad crept closer to the sleeping men. The black man’s chest rose and fell as he snored. The fire crackled. Dad halved the distance between them before his foot hit some debris and he pitched forward. I gasped, but he got his hand up on the wall just in time to stop himself.

Dad took a shaky breath, then another painstaking step forward. He was less than a foot away now. The fire was bright red on his face, and his wrinkled forehead glistened with sweat. Slowly, painfully, he knelt down. Thunder boomed overhead and he froze for a second, looking at the man’s face, studying it for any hint of consciousness. When he saw none, he reached his hand out little by little until the tips of his fingers brushed the metal keys, then crawled up their length toward the clasp. My stomach was a knot. Dad pinched the clasp open gently and then slowly, achingly slowly, he pulled the keys away and they fell into his palm. My heart leapt. “Put the keys down.”

The man with the scar was up on his knees. An enormous gun grew out of his hand and was pointed directly at Dad’s head. “Now.”

Everything was deadly still for a split second, but then Dad jerked to one side, tossing the keys at me as he did it. “Run!” he shouted.

I scrambled to catch them but the woman sprang up behind me and pushed me down, snatching the keys out of the air. There was a boom, deafening in the steel walls of the plane, as the man’s gun rang out. Thank God he was drunk. The bullet missed Dad by inches and slammed into the ground.

Dad scrambled toward me as the black man woke and pulled his own gun out of its holster. The slavers slid out of their places, weaving in their still-drunk state. Dad didn’t say a word. He leveled the rifle and fired, its report pounding at my ears. The bullet went high, ricocheting with a wet-sounding ping. The men stumbled backward, surprised.

“We don’t want any trouble,” Dad announced.

“They’re ours,” the man with the scar slurred in a deep Southern accent.

Dad kept his voice level. “Not anymore.”

The slaver laughed. It sounded like a landslide, boulders tumbling together. He slapped his partner in the chest and they got on their feet and came toward us.

“Get back,” Dad commanded, backing up and jutting the rifle out in front of him, but the men just laughed and kept coming. They must have heard the fear that had crept into his voice. They saw us for what we were. We were no heroes.

I backed out of the plane. The woman and the boy were already gone. As I stepped outside the slavers’ jeep was revving up and pulling away.

“Wait!” I screamed, but the woman didn’t even look back as she took off with the boy beside her. Red taillights glowed in their wake.

Dad tumbled out of the plane and fired two more shots over the men’s heads, sending them ducking inside. Then he turned and headed toward me.

“Run,” he called. “Go!”

The two slavers emerged from the plane behind him. “Dad! Look out!”

Drunk or not, the man with the scar moved fast. He was on Dad in a second, grabbing the top of his backpack and yanking him backward. Dad lost the rifle and his pack, but he whipped around and threw a punch that glanced off the man’s head. It didn’t do much damage but it knocked him back, into the mud. The black man came at him now.

Dad turned and screamed, “Just go!” as the man slammed into his back and they hit the ground, grappling in the mud. The man with the scar was coming at Dad from behind so I scooped up the rifle and swung it by the barrel like a club. The heavy stock struck him on the back of the head and sent him down again.

Dad reared back and threw a solid punch to the black man’s face, dropping him into the mud with his partner.

“Run!” Dad yelled again.

We took off, blind from the pounding rain that turned the world around us a featureless gray. Paolo brayed as we passed him. There was no other choice. We’d have to come back for him. We’d never escape with him in tow.

I couldn’t tell if the men were chasing us or the woman, so I just ran, cradling the mud-covered rifle in my arms, desperately trying to keep up with Dad, who was little more than a flickering shadow darting ahead of me. The thunder pounded constantly, atomic blasts of it, following blue-white flares of lightning. Every time, I ducked instinctively, like I was expecting a shower of shrapnel to follow.

Who knows how long we ran, or how far. At some point I crashed into what felt like an oak tree. I tried to dodge around it, but then I looked up and saw it was Dad.

“Do you see them?” He had to lean right down by my ear and shout for me to hear him at all.

“I can’t see anything!”

Dad turned all around, sheets of water coursing off his head and shoulders. I wanted to scream that it was pointless, that we needed to keep running, but then there was another flash of lightning and a crack, and for a second it seemed like there might be a ridge of some kind out ahead of us. Dad grabbed my elbow and pulled us toward it.

“Come on! Maybe there’s shelter!”

By then, the ground had turned to a slurry of mud and rocks and wrecked grass. Every few steps my feet would sink into it and I’d have to pull myself out one foot at a time, terrified that I’d lose sight of Dad and be lost out in that gray nothing, forever.

As we ran, the ridge ahead of us became more and more solid, a looming black wall. I prayed for a cave, but even a good notch in the rock wall would have been enough to get us out of the rain and hide until morning. We were only about fifty feet from it when Dad came to an abrupt halt.

“Why are we stopping?!”

Dad didn’t say anything, he simply pointed.

Between us and the ridge there was an immense gash in the earth, a gorge some thirty feet across and another thirty deep, with steep, muddy walls on our side and the ridge on the opposite. A boiling mess of muddy water, tree stumps, and trash raged at the bottom.

Dad searched left and right for a crossing, but there wasn’t any. His shoulders slumped. Even through the curtain of rain I could see the sunken hollow of his eyes, deep red-lined pits that sat in skin as gray as the air around us.

“I’m sorry, Stephen. I swear to God, I’m so sorry.”

I reached out for his arm, to tell him it was going to be okay, that we’d be fine, but before my fingers could even graze his soaked coat, the ground beneath his feet disappeared. What was solid ground turned to mud in an instant and he went flailing, flying backward. There was a flash of lightning as he fell, arms pinwheeling, his mouth open in a shocked O. There was nothing at his back but thirty feet of open air and, beyond that, the bared fangs of a raging river.

When the lightning subsided, he was gone.

FIVE

I didn’t think, I just jumped, sliding down the muddy wall, then tumbling end over end when it collapsed beneath me. I hit a small piece of ground at the bottom, a tiny shore, and pulled myself up out of the mud.

“Dad!” I screamed, searching the river and the opposite shore for some sign of him, but it was useless. “Dad!”

Another lightning flash and I caught a glimpse of something large in the water, moving fast downstream. I tugged off my pack, stripped down to my shorts and T-shirt, and dove in.

The icy water ripped the breath out of me as soon as I hit it. I had to struggle to move and get my blood flowing again. It took all my strength to stay focused on the big shadow in the water downstream and avoid the outcroppings of rock and the logs that shot by. I knew it could have been anything — a tree, or a clot of mud and rock — but I dug my arms hard into the cold water, praying, pulling for it.

I was only a few feet away when a flash of something dark and a thrashing arm shot up out of the churn. Yes! I stabbed my arms into the water and managed to get ahold of the collar of his coat. I pulled him to me but only had him for a second before we slammed sideways into a rock jutting out of the water. Dad shot away again headfirst down the river. He wasn’t moving. His body was limp, tossed about and swept away by the current.

The cold sank deeper into my body, seizing on my muscles, paralyzing them. I let out a scream and pushed off the rock I was stuck on, thrashing through the water. A surge in the current rocketed me forward. I was almost on him. I reached, missed, then reached again, feeling the barest whisper of his coat against my fingertips. The third time I caught him.

I scrambled forward, catching hold of his shoulder, hooking my arm under his armpit, and dragging him to me. Soaked with water, he was incredibly heavy. The current tried to suck him away and under, but I managed to draw him to my chest and kick off toward a shallow area at the edge of the river. I kicked and kicked, dragging us toward the shore, pushing Dad ahead of me and then climbing out after him.

I turned him over onto his stomach and leaned over him, putting all of my weight into his back, hoping to push out whatever water was in his lungs. He was bleeding from the back of his head. Thick clots of blood pooled at the base of his neck and then washed away, misty red in the rain. I was pretty sure his right arm was broken in more than one place, maybe a leg too. I turned him over onto his back. His skin was a ghastly blue-gray in the low light. His mouth was hanging open. A voice in my head, Grandpa’s sandpaper rasp, told me he was dead.

I laid my ear up against his mouth and listened as hard as I could, clapping my hand over my other ear to block out the rain. At first there was nothing, just empty silence, but then there was a flutter, and the slightest rise in his chest. He was alive!

I pulled him farther from the edge of the water, his waterlogged clothes adding twenty pounds or more. The muscles in my arms and back and legs howled, but I made it to the ridge and found a deep depression in the rock. It wasn’t as good as a cave, but it would have to do.

I dragged Dad in and laid him on his side in case he started throwing up water. I thought about trying to go back for our stuff. There were some medical supplies on the wagon — bandages, antiseptic — but God knew how far away it was, and the storm, if anything, was getting worse. Instead, I pushed myself into the hollow beside him.

Blood was pouring out of the gash on his head. I tore off my T-shirt and ripped it into strips with my teeth and used them to pack off and bind the wound, trying my best to ignore the soft broken feel at the back of his skull. My breath froze in my chest as the blood advanced through the cloth, eating through several layers before finally stopping and holding still. I breathed again.

I wanted to do something about his arm and leg, but what they needed was some sort of splint. That clearly wasn’t possible, so I had to let it go. They looked bad, but not life threatening.

My biggest problem was the cold. The depression we were in only gave us a bit of shelter from the wind and the rain. There was no brush to pack around us and no possibility of a fire. I wasn’t sure if it was cold enough to kill us, though I suspected if it fell another five to ten degrees during the night, it might be. I strained, trying to think of some other option, but finally had to admit that there was none.

I sat up with Dad all that night, clutching him to my chest and fighting the waves of exhaustion that threatened to drag me under. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t leave him alone. As the lightning slashed the dark and the rain poured around us, all I could think about was the bear.

I was seven. We were camped in dense forest way up north at the Canadian border, a day or two from the Northern Gathering. The trees in Canada were the biggest I had ever seen, standing close together in impenetrable ranks with thick, nut-brown hides and a tangle of branches and leaves that nearly blotted out the sun.

I didn’t plan to wander off, but when we got to our campsite and Mom, Dad, and Grandpa began setting up, I saw a robin at the edge of the clearing. It flew off as I approached it but I kept on going, drawn toward a pile of smooth rocks or a splash of sunlight on the pine needle–covered ground. It was a beautiful morning, cool and misty, with only the first stirrings of animals to keep me company. Before I knew it the forest had closed behind me and I was alone. I wasn’t scared. It was thrilling being off the path. I dodged through the trees, down a hill, and deeper into the woods. It grew dim and hushed all around, the air full with the smell of decaying things.

It wasn’t long before I found the video game. It was one of the big stand-up ones that Dad said they used to have in arcades when he was a kid. It was sitting at an odd canted angle, half on, half off a thick tree root that had sprung out of the ground. It said MORTAL KOMBAT on its side and was covered with colorful pictures of gigantic men and women in masks grappling with one another. The paint was peeling off in places, revealing a rusty metal surface underneath. Who knew how it got there? We ran into things like it, strange misplaced relics, from time to time.

I crunched through fallen leaves and up onto a little metal step at the bottom that raised me higher so I was face-to-face with the machine. Mom said she had played these constantly when she was a kid, before her parents finally broke down and bought her a home system. Down by my knees were two slots for coins. I reached into my pocket and mimed dropping two in, then started jerking the hand controls around, imagining the characters fighting it out at my command, making the sounds of punches and kicks with my mouth.

Bam. Bam. Baf. Crash. Ugh!

Leaves crunched behind me.

A twig snapped.

My hands froze on the controls.

I saw his outline first, a great looming thing reflected in the glass of the game. When I turned, the bear was maybe fifteen feet away, staring at me through the low tree branches, his mouth hanging open, teeth glistening. I guessed he had to weigh five hundred pounds or more. The bear’s head was lowered, his brown muzzle thrust out at me, sniffing. His blank black eyes were fixed at the center of my chest.

I thought my heart would crack a rib the way it was pounding. The thing lumbered forward, slow and awkward as a nightmare, until he halved the distance between us.

He was close enough now that his breath, smelling like the humid rot of a swamp, struck my chest like an open palm. His black-spotted tongue lolled around in his mouth and over the peaks of his fangs. The bear reared back, then opened his maw and roared. It went on and on and the sound of it, so close, dropped me to my knees in the grass. Everything inside me, everything I had ever felt, or thought, or hoped for, was pushed aside like a river tearing away soil and grass and trees, leaving only bedrock.

The bear raised one paw to close the remaining distance between us when an explosion rocked the air. The bear flinched, whipped its head backward, and roared, but then there was another explosion and the bear crumpled into a heap at my feet. His lungs filled once and then collapsed with a slow whine.

Someone was racing through the woods toward me, but I couldn’t look away from the bear. I had never been so close to something so wild, yet so still. I reached out, brushed my hand along the rough grain of his fur, and started to cry.

Dad dropped to his knees beside me. The barrel of Grandpa’s rifle was still smoking as he wrapped his arms around me, pulling me tight to his chest. I could feel his own heart pounding.

“You’re safe,” he said over and over, rocking me back and forth and crying too. “I’m here, Stephen, and you’re safe. You’re safe.”

Safe.

The war of rain and lightning and thunder hammered on throughout the night. I looked up at the gorge’s edge high above us, but I knew that no rescuer would appear. There was no one left. There was only me.

I wrapped my arms around Dad as tight as I could, shivering, hoping our little bit of body heat would be enough to keep us alive until the rain stopped and the sun rose.

It had only been twenty-four hours since Grandpa died.

SIX

When morning came, the storm had passed. In its place was a bright day with a blue sky. Dad’s eyes were closed and his mouth was hanging slightly open. I put my ear down to his mouth and waited. At first there was nothing, but then I made out his slow, ragged breathing. I sat back, relieved.

His lips were horribly dry and cracked, so I went down to the river and brought back as much water as I could in my cupped hands. It was dark and silty and I knew it could be polluted, but what choice did I have? I knelt down next to him, awkwardly trying to keep the water from spilling, then leaned forward to trickle some of the water down into his mouth. I stopped before the first drop fell.

Can he swallow? Or will the water just make him choke?

My hands and back cramped as I leaned over him, indecisive. It was too much of a chance. I splashed the water onto the rocks, then sat down with my back to him, facing the river, stewing with frustration.

Grandpa always said that a good plan will get you out of anything. But what plan could I make? I was at the bottom of a gorge with thirty-foot walls. Even if I could get out, where would I go? Back to the plane?

Certainly the slavers would have taken anything worthwhile that we left.

If Grandpa had been alive, or if Dad had been awake, then maybe we would have had a chance. They were the ones who came up with the plans. They were the ones who knew what to do. I just did what I was told. I ached for things to be the way they were.

I lifted my head out of my hands and watched the river course by, carrying with it leaves, trash, and shattered logs. A current of broken bones and tattered skin. I thought again of that day with the bear and the crack of Grandpa’s rifle.

No one is coming. If I do nothing, we die.

I managed to push Dad to the back of the little cave, out of the glare of the sun. Then I knelt down beside him.

“I have to go,” I told him, clinging to his arm. “But I’ll be back, okay?”

I found my clothes, backpack, and the rifle at the base of the gorge and waded across the river to get them. After I washed the mud off my clothes, I put them back on. The rifle was caked with grit, useless. If I could find the cleaning kit back in our wagon, then maybe I could get it working again. I dug inside my soaked pack and lifted out my three books. Each was swollen to nearly double its size. Just touching the waterlogged paper caused it to slough off like dead skin.

My eyes burned, but I wouldn’t cry. Not over that.

I threw the books aside, located my fire starter at the bottom of the pack, and stuck it in my back pocket. The wall was higher than I remembered, its face made of mud and half-dried dirt. Outcroppings of rock and tree roots sprouted here and there. It was so steep I got dizzy just looking at it.

I jammed my hands and feet into the mud and started, painstakingly, to pull myself up. For every two feet of progress I made, I’d slide at least a foot, but I didn’t give up. I kept one of Grandpa’s commandments running in my head the whole time. Food. Water. Shelter. Fire. That was all that was important. Find these things and live. Don’t, and die.

Panting, I clawed my way to the top, then pulled myself over.

The land we had crossed the day before, with its carpet of sparkling grass and flowers, was now a plain of mud strewn with branches, rocks, and dead leaves. It was like the end of the world had returned, eager to finish its work.

I didn’t know how far we had come or in what direction. The plane could have been anywhere. I started by walking directly away from the gorge and then, pretty sure that the ridge we saw the night before had always been on our right, turned so it was on my left and kept going. The sun dried my clothes until they became stiff and scratchy. I walked until I wanted more than anything to sit down and never move again, but there was something in me that kept going, no matter how much I wanted to stop.

Finally a dark shape appeared far up ahead. Through the rifle’s scope I could see what I was sure was a wing emerging from the mud. It was still a mile or so off. I dropped my head and pushed on, trudging toward whatever small salvation might be there.

When I reached the plane, the first thing I did was check for Paolo. He was gone, of course. Only a few scrap pieces of leather and brass from his tack remained.

I squatted and held his reins in my hand, rubbing my finger over the rough surface. Mom had found him on an abandoned horse farm and we’d nursed him back to health. I wondered if the slavers had taken him or if he’d freed himself in the storm somehow and had gone looking for us. That idea of Paolo lost, wandering about in the storm hoping to find me and Dad, made me feel like I was drowning.

Our wagon was smashed to pieces. All that remained of our things were a few useless pieces of metal and a big water jug I knew would be too heavy to take back to camp. I took a long drink, then stepped carefully inside the plane, where, after digging around for a few moments, I found Dad’s knife and slipped it underneath my belt.

Dad’s pack was half buried in the mud outside. Luckily the waterproof bag where we kept our first-aid kit, water purifying tablets, and extra rounds for the rifle was intact. I pulled all of them out along with some beef jerky and the gun-cleaning kit. I tore off a hunk of jerky and muscled it down my throat. Even though it hit my empty stomach like a ball of lead, it made me feel solid and awake for the first time that day.

Before I closed up Dad’s pack, I reached down to the bottom and hunted around until my fingers closed around the only photograph we owned. I pulled it out into the sun.

It was of me and Mom and Dad. There was a stand of trees behind us and, towering above it, the bright red tracks of a roller coaster, twisting like the unearthed skeleton of a dinosaur, and a sign that said WELCOME To SIX FLAGS GREAT ADVENTURE! We were all grinning. I was maybe seven or eight, leaning against Mom’s legs, her small hands resting lightly on my shoulders. She was caught mid-laugh, pretty and young-looking in her blue coat, her tree-bark curls poking out from the big straw hat she sometimes wore. Her cheeks were bright and rosy from the cold. Dad was next to Mom giving a goofy double thumbs-up to the camera.

The way the shot was framed, you could barely tell that the roller coaster was half covered in rust, only a few years away from collapsing, or that the rest of the amusement park was a no-man’s-land filled with wild, rabid dogs.

It was taken as we’d traveled toward the Northern Gathering. This seedy little guy had been wandering around with an old camera, one of those automatic ones, the kind that develop the pictures themselves. He was making a small living trading pictures for food and supplies, trying to make as much as he could before the batteries or the film ran out and he’d be unable to replace them.

I traced my finger around Mom’s face and then around the outline of us standing together, a cloudless blue sky behind us. I liked to imagine that the picture had been taken before the Collapse, that we were just a family taking a trip out to the amusement park where we would ride rides and eat popcorn, our laughter rising into the sky like balloons. At the end of the day we’d drive home in the gathering dark and I’d fall asleep, my head cradled in Mom’s lap, her fingers lightly brushing the hair back from my forehead.

But then, as always, I looked down, just to Mom’s left under the Six Flags sign. A couple years later, Dad and Grandpa would dig two graves there, one large and one small, while I watched.

There was a sudden, sharp pain in my left hand. When I opened it, a line of blood trickled down my wrist and dripped onto the ground. In the center of my palm there were four half-moon-shaped cuts from where my nails had dug into the flesh. I wiped the blood on my jeans and put the picture safely back in the pack. As I walked away from the plane, I stuffed my left hand deep down into my pocket, as though I was scared someone might see.

It was late afternoon by the time I got back to the gorge, loaded down with supplies and whatever little bits of wood I could find for a fire. Dad hadn’t changed much. His breathing was shallow but regular. The first thing I did was unwind the T-shirt bandage around his head and check on his wound. The gash along the back of his skull still seeped blood, but slower than it had last night. I pulled some antiseptic out of the first-aid kit and smeared it over the wound, then packed it off and bound it with some clean bandages. Again I felt the shifting, broken feel at the back of his head, the bone plates sliding against each other, but there was nothing I could do about that.

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.

SEVEN

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.

EIGHT

“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.

The kid I’d almost shot was next to him. He was heavyset with a pinched, worried-looking face. He kept his head down and his arms crossed over his chest, not meeting anyone’s eye.

Whoever they were, I didn’t know what they intended to do with me and, like Grandpa always said, if they weren’t family, they were trouble. I scanned the ground around my feet and found a rock about the size of a small apple that came to a brutal point at one end. I leaned forward, slipped it into my palm, then pushed myself backward until I was up against the wall of the gorge.

The kid nudged the leader. “He’s awake.”

The bald man was about to step forward, but the one I had shot, a teenager with a shock of golden hair that fell over his eye, appeared out of nowhere.

“Who are you?” he spat. “What are you doing here?” I gripped the rock in my fist, ready to defend myself, but the bald man pushed him out of the way.

“He’s just a kid, Will,” he said. “Not much younger than you. Now step back and let me handle this.”

“We oughta string him up, right here and now, Marcus.”

The bald man, Marcus, looked around the bare walls of the crevasse. “String him up from what?”

“Marcus—”

“No one is getting strung up,” Marcus said sternly, which only enraged Will more.

“He shot me!”

“He grazed you, Will,” Sam said. “You were barely bleeding. You’re not even limping.”

Will ignored him and kept after Marcus. “He’s a spy for Fort Leonard! They both are! When I get home, I’ll tell my father. I’ll tell everyone!”

Marcus took a step closer to Will until their chests were almost touching. Marcus was actually an inch or so shorter, but he had shoulders like a buffalo and something deep and forceful in him.

“Tell them anything you want, Will, but for right now, shut the hell up. You’re giving me a headache.”

The black man laughed at that, a booming “Ha!” that caused Will to shoot him a deadly look before he sneered and, with a chuckle, shook his head in a snotty attempt at saving face. In the end he skulked away downstream, kicking a charred log from the fire with his bad leg. Marcus turned his back on Will and squatted down in front of me. I jerked away instinctively.

Marcus held up his hands, palms out. “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t mean any harm. Will there’s daddy owns a lot of cattle and things. Sometimes he thinks that means he’s next in line to a throne we all keep trying to tell him doesn’t exist.”

Marcus smiled, obviously trying to put me at ease, but I just stared at him, turning the rock around in my palm.

“Looks like Sam gave you a hell of a knock there.”

“Sorry,” Sam said in a deep Northern accent. He dropped his paw of a hand on the kid’s shoulder. “Couldn’t let you shoot Jackson here. We’ve just gotten to like him.”

Jackson shrugged out from under the man’s hand, embarrassed. “Sam…”

“What do you people want?” I asked.

Marcus dropped his grin. “I’m Marcus Green,” he said, then pointed to the kid who stood shyly in the background. “That’s my son, Jackson. His highness there is Will Henry. Sam Turner’s the man who gave you that tap on the head.”

“Howdy,” Sam said.

Marcus looked back at Sam. Something passed between them that ended with Sam looking off after Will, then nodding. Marcus slipped a hunting knife from a sheath on his belt.

I flinched backward, ready to swing the rock as best I could, but Marcus held his hands up again to steady me, then began sawing at the ropes around my wrists. I watched him carefully, even as the ropes popped open and he started on the ones at my feet.

“That your dad?”

Marcus waited, but I said nothing. Grandpa always said you should never tell anyone anything they didn’t need to know.

“Well, whoever he is, he looks like he’s hurt pretty bad.”

Marcus looked up at me as he worked, like he was taking my measure. He was trying to talk himself into something, and the fight was going back and forth. When the ropes snapped under his knife, he glanced back at Sam again. Sam hesitated, then gave a reluctant nod.

“We can help you,” Marcus said under his breath. “We have a town. It’s not too far. My wife, Violet, is a doctor. Not one of those drunks running around claiming to be a doctor either — she’s the real thing. Army doctor before the Collapse. We could bring you both back to town with us and she could take a look at your dad.”

He was lying, of course. If they had medicine, why would they waste it on some guy they didn’t even know? Still…

“I don’t have anything to trade,” I said.

“We’re not asking for anything,” Sam said. “Just offering our help.”

I scanned their faces, searching for some sign of the deception I knew had to be there. But I wasn’t Grandpa; I didn’t have his eye. Whatever they wanted, whatever they were planning, I couldn’t see what it was.

Not that it mattered. Small towns had begun to pop up in the last few years, but Grandpa had always kept us away from them. They were nothing but muddy collections of tumbledown shacks, he said, that stank of people living too close together and bred smallpox and dysentery. Besides that, they were targets for every slave trader, scavenger, or bandit around, like nails begging to be hammered down.

“We just want to be left alone,” I said squarely to Marcus. “We can take care of ourselves.”

“You sure?” Marcus asked.

I nodded. Marcus signaled to Jackson and he stepped forward, his eyes on the ground in front of me. He handed Marcus a small cardboard box, then retreated to the stream’s edge.

“Looked like you were about out,” Marcus said, handing me the box. “You take care of yourself now. Sorry for the trouble. We’re heading west if you change your mind.”

They gathered up their things and turned to head downstream. Jackson lagged behind them, and for the first time that morning, he raised his eyes to meet mine. His were light blue and big and, like a doe’s, smart and skittish at the same time. He looked like he had something to say.

“What?”

Jackson shook his head. “Nothing. Sorry.” Then he turned and followed the others out of our camp.

Only when they were out of sight did I reach for the cardboard box and open it up. Inside were four rows of five gleaming silver-jacketed bullets, set tip-down in a piece of white foam. I pulled one out and rolled the cold metal between my fingers. They were much newer than the ones we had, probably made right before the Collapse.

Footsteps clicked against the rock, echoing down the walls of the gorge, growing softer each second. It wouldn’t be long until Dad and I were alone again.

With Dad the way he was, I’d never be able to get us out of there. I closed the box of bullets and struggled to my feet, my head pounding.

I knew that what I was doing was wrong. If Grandpa had been around, he’d have had a better answer, but he wasn’t. It was just me.

“Marcus!” I called out as I ran down the shore. “Sam! Wait up!”