The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch Read Free Book Online Page A

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 rainof 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 manwho’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