The Eleventh Plague Read Online Free PDF Page A

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