Read The Eleventh Plague for Free Online Page B

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