The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch

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!”

NINE
    We headed west for the rest of that day, tumbling through the yellow grass just below a heavily cratered highway. A thin sheet of clouds, like dirty cotton, was smeared across the sky.
    They had me wear a bandanna over my eyes all morning so I wouldn’t know the path they were taking, but they let me take it off by the time the sun was halfway into the sky. Not that it mattered much. I had never been so far west in my life and had no clue where I was.
    Marcus led the way with Jackson bringing up the rear. I was with Dad in their wood-slat wagon, sitting behind Sam and Will. Lying across from us was a buck Marcus said he’d shot earlier that morning. I tried not to look at it. Its stillness and empty, glasslike eyes caused something inside me to quake.
    I scanned the area around us for salvage, eager for something familiar, but there was nothing useful on the path, just blowing trash and a few distant billboards and road signs.
    I huddled down behind the front bench of the wagon and tended to Dad. He was lashed to a driftwood stretcher that Sam had improvised to get him out of the gorge. I raised his head into my lap and poured some water over his lips to wet them, careful that none of it went downhis throat. I made sure Sam and Will were focused on the road, then took his arm in my hand