The Eleventh Plague Read Online Free PDF

enough to get us out of the rain and hideuntil 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 intoa 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