Plague riders, p.1
Plague Riders, page 1
Text copyright © 2012 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.
Darby Creek
A division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.
241 First Avenue North
Minneapolis, MN 55401 U.S.A.
Website address: www.lernerbooks.com
Cover and Interior images: © iStockphoto.com/Diane Labombarbe (tribal style horse); © iStockphoto.com/Lou Oates (antique blank album page, background); © iStockphoto.com/Anagramm, (burnt edge, background); © iStockphoto.com/Evgeny Kuklev (aged notebook background); © iStockphoto.com/kizilkayaphotos (coffee stain); © iStockphoto.com/José Luis Gutiérrez (fingerprints); © iStockphoto.com/Bojan Stamenkovic (burnt paper background).
Main body text set in Janson Text LT Std 55 Roman 12/17.5. Typeface provided by Adobe Systems.
Goodman, Gabriel.
Plague riders / by Gabriel Goodman.
p. cm. — (After the dust settled)
Summary: “Fourteen-year-old Shep Greenfield is a plague rider. He rides his horse between the makeshift colonies along the Wisconsin River, delivering homemade medicine to people infected with nightpox, a deadly, highly communicable disease. While trading meds for much needed grains, Shep finds evidence that suggests his parents—who disappeared in an attack a year ago—may be alive in a distant settlement called Dusty Hollow, where the nightpox is most prevalent. When he learns that the disease-ridden settlement is about to be burned down, Shep plots to find his parents”—Provided by pub.
ISBN 978–0–7613–8330–7 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper)
[1. Survival—Fiction. 2. Plague—Fiction. 3. Wisconsin—Fiction. 4. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.G61366Pl 2012
[Fic]—dc23 2011051355
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 – PP – 7/15/12
eISBN: 978-1-4677-0027-6 (pdf)
eISBN: 978-1-4677-6654-8 (ePub)
eISBN: 978-1-4677-3073-0 (mobi)
For Melech.
CHAPTER ONE
E
veryone looked up in awe whenever the plague riders came to town.
Shep sat atop his horse, Old Gray, and looked down at the people alongside the gravel path that followed the river. No matter what they were doing—tending gardens, scrubbing laundry, cooking over open fires—everyone stopped to watch the two horses canter along the riverside. Sometimes, people cheered. The plague riders meant help was on the way.
Wrapped from head to toe in mismatched cloths that left only a slit for his eyes, no one could see Shep grinning back. He liked the attention. He liked the respect they paid, with nods and waves. It made him feel important, needed. The feeling was a luxury. It wouldn’t last long. Once he got back to River’s Edge, he would be reminded of what he really was: a glorified delivery boy.
Mariah, the horse matching Old Gray’s pace to the left, whinnied. Shep turned to find Cara, his co-rider, pulling gently on Mariah’s reins. Like him, she was unrecognizable under layer upon layer of protective cloth. He could tell by the way Cara’s head slumped forward that the summer heat was getting to her. But the cloths were necessary. Nightpox was highly contagious. They knew the rules. Doctor St. John himself had spelled them out: if you come back from a plague camp and you’re sick, you’ll be left outside to die.
The “town” was just one of the dozens of makeshift colonies. They had sprung up along the river when the nightpox struck and sick people were driven out of the larger communities. Like the other camps, it took its name from what was there before the Fall. This place—the remains of a boathouse and supper club—called itself Muddy Waters, after the supper club’s old name.
Shep knew that about forty people lived here, most of whom were bedridden. Muddy Waters was one of the nicer places he rode to. Some of the other settlements? Not so much.
As they approached the boathouse, Shep slid expertly from his saddle. Cara, who’d only learned to ride a month ago, struggled to dismount. When he moved to help her, she swatted his hand away. He waited patiently as Cara dropped to the ground, then tied the horses to a railing on the nearby dock.
Shep grabbed the weathered leather saddlebag that hung off Old Gray’s side. He knocked on the boathouse door and waited. A moment later, a portly woman in dusty clothes answered. Mrs. Adams was the closest thing Muddy Waters had to a mayor. Anyone who wanted to deal with the town dealt with her.
Mrs. Adams offered a curt nod, her face hidden behind a bandana. “Good to see you, Mr. Greenfield. Thanks for coming so quickly.”
Tall for fourteen, Shep was often mistaken for an adult when covered in his protective clothing. There was no way twelve-year-old Cara ever would be. Anyone could see she was a child. This was by design. Doctor St. John picked his riding teams carefully. He knew that even though the area along the river was filled with bandits, most of them wouldn’t attack a child.
Most. Not all. They’d been lucky so far.
Mrs. Adams stepped aside to let Shep and Cara into the boathouse. Inside, it smelled like murky water and rotting timber. At what was once a checkout counter, she poured them each a small glass of rust-colored water, part of the agreed-upon price for their services. Cara peeled open a mouth hole in her face wrappings and downed it. But Shep politely declined. Everything worked more smoothly if people thought he was an adult. He nodded to Cara to drink his glass too.
Shep opened the saddlebag and spilled its contents onto a nearby coffee table. A halfdozen translucent brown pill bottles clattered across the countertop. “A whole month’s supply,” he said, doing his best to deepen his voice. “Just like you ordered.”
Mrs. Adams frowned at the bottles. “That last batch didn’t seem very potent. I think Doctor St. John’s been holding out on us.”
Shep swallowed. Mrs. Adams was usually easy to deal with. “You’d have to take that up with the doctor,” he said, trying to hide the worry in his voice. “I just deliver the pills.”
Mrs. Adams didn’t stop scowling. With a grunt, she pointed to a corner and a big burlap sack, filled to the brim with bright green corncobs. “You give me a month of medicine. I give you two months of food. Hardly seems fair.”
“Sorry,” Shep said, hoisting the sack up onto his shoulder. “Doctor St. John sets the prices.”
“Hey, Shepherd. This guy looks like you.”
Shep stopped at his partner’s voice. He turned to find her staring at the wall where a series of picture frames hung. He didn’t know people still hung pictures on the wall. Cara’s eyes were fixed on a small oval frame. As Shep peered through the dim light, a ripple of recognition tickled the hairs on the back of his neck. He set the bag down and leaned in to examine the picture.
His father was staring back.
Both his parents, in fact. The picture he knew well was old. Really old. It showed his parents’ wedding day. Back before the Fall, when people still had use for things like cameras. He’d always been told he looked like his father. But he hadn’t seen his father for a year.
A lump caught in his throat as he pulled the picture from the wall and ran his thumbs around the curved edges.
“What are you doing?” Mrs. Adams said, yanking the frame from his hands.
“Please,” Shep said, forgetting he was supposed to be an adult, “where did you get that?”
Mrs. Adams eyed him suspiciously. “I traded it. Couple months ago. Got it off a guy up in Dusty Hollow, north of here. Stupid trade. Not like I’ll ever use it. But I felt sorry for him. He was sick and starving. I traded him some bread for the frame. Don’t know why—I don’t even have a picture to put in it.”
She hung it back on the wall. Shep continued to stare at it, stunned. “Was it the man in the picture?” he asked. “Is that who traded it to you?”
Mrs. Adams shrugged. “Dunno. Might have been. Didn’t really look at him. He had the nightpox. Nobody looks the same after that.” She seemed to sense his interest: “If you want that frame, it’ll cost you another bottle of pills.”
Shep could feel his temperature rise. He fought an urge to rip the frame off the wall. It belonged to his family. Those were his parents, and he had every right to it. But peace between the river settlements was a tricky thing. People kept civil when they bartered for what they needed. If he stole the frame, it would get back to Doctor St. John and then there’d be a price to pay. That was assuming he and Cara made it out of Muddy Waters alive.
He’d heard of Dusty Hollow but had only a vague idea where it was. “Is it far? Dusty Hollow?”
“Shepherd ...” There was a warning in Cara’s voice. Doctor St. John had given them exactly enough food and water to make the trip to Muddy Waters and back. There was nowhere else they could go with what they had left.
Mrs. Adams reached under the counter. Instinctively, Shep stood in front of Cara, in case Mrs. Adams was grabbing a weapon. Instead, she pulled out a map.
It was old, made of real paper. She spread it open and poked at a red dot near a curvy blue line.
“We’re here. ...” she said, then ran her finger up the blue line to a black dot. “And that’s Dusty Hollow. It’s about two days by horse to the north. You thinking about going there?”
Shep glared at the map
“I...I don’t know.” He heard Cara click her tongue.
Mrs. Adams rolled the map back up. “Well, if you want to find the people in that picture, you better be quick about it.”
“Why?” Shep asked.
Although her mouth and nose were hidden behind the bandana, Shep could still make out her eyes. She leveled him with a serious look.
“Because,” she said, “in three days’ time, Dusty Hollow is being burned to the ground. Everyone there is going to die.”
CHAPTER TWO
I
t had been only three months earlier that Shep’s nightmares finally stopped. After talking to Mrs. Adams, he had a feeling that they’d be back with a vengeance.
He couldn’t shake the memory of that night when his parents disappeared. They were living on the family’s horse ranch outside a dead town called Mazomanie in what used to be Wisconsin. Before the Fall, Shep’s dad ran a veterinary clinic out of their house while his mom trained the horses. After the Fall, they’d thrown themselves into making their home self-sustaining. For the first thirteen years of Shep’s life, they’d lived in their own little getaway from the rest of the world.
His mother had taught him all about horses: how to ride them, how to feed them and, most important, how to treat them. “Horses are like people,” she’d said. “They want what we all want. Respect.”
His father had hoped to teach Shep about how to heal animals. He already bartered his own skills with some neighboring towns. If Shep could take over for him someday, those skills would serve Shep the rest of his life.
But early attempts to teach Shep to read came to a halt when his struggles led his dad to believe he had a “problem.” Dyslexia, he’d called it. So, instead of reading, Shep learned what he could from watching his father. He honed his instincts for animal care. Although his parents never said it, Shep imagined that his inability to read disappointed them.
“I want to be a horse.” Shep remembered telling his mother this when he was eight.
“Why’s that?” she asked.
“Because horses just are,” Shep told her. “They don’t have to worry about who they want to be. Like daddy’s an animal doctor. And you’re a trainer.”
His mother stroked his hair and smiled a strange smile. “It’s a new world, Shepherd,” she said. “Lots of opportunities to figure out who you ought to be.”
Shep threw himself into working with the horses, which came naturally. He grew skilled at it. His parents often said he was the best rider in the family.
From time to time, his father would return from helping people in a nearby community with stories that there was trouble. Armed outlaws had started wandering around, taking whatever they pleased. Shep’s father dismissed the rumors. But Shep knew his dad well enough to know the man wasn’t taking chances either.
One night a year ago, Shep’s dad had come back from helping some nearby farmers deliver a baby calf. He was ashen-faced and quiet. He wouldn’t tell his family about the latest rumor. But each night for the next week, his dad stayed up late to keep an eye on the ranch. He’d sit on the porch with a loaded shotgun.
The night he’d decided the raiders weren’t coming was the night they attacked.
Half asleep, Shep heard his parents’ screams. Men were shouting downstairs. There were gunshots and shattering glass. He heard his mother call out, “Run, Shepherd! Get out of here!” His heart beating in his chest, he’d raced from the house, casting a single look over his shoulder. He saw men wearing bright red bandanas and carrying torches. One held his mother while two wrestled his father to the ground. He ran and ran until he collapsed from exhaustion in the forest.
The next day, he returned to the house to find it ransacked and his parents missing. He waited, believing that they’d come to look for him there. But with most of the supplies taken by the raiders, Shep could only stay two days before he had to go in search of food.
He went to the stable and saddled up Old Gray. Together, they moved due west. By the end of the day, both Shep and his favorite horse were nearing exhaustion. Thirsty and growing feverish, Shep finally found himself just outside River’s Edge, a tiny hospital along the Wisconsin River. His mother had once told him that he’d been born there, just days before the Fall. It didn’t look like how Shep imagined hospitals looked. There were boards on the windows and barbed wire at the doors. A man nearly shot Shep as he approached.
But they let him in. It was here Shep met Doctor St. John. The doctor asked Shep a series of questions. After learning Shep knew a thing or two about horses, he granted Shep permission to stay. That was when Shep became a plague rider.
He spent the next six months hoping his parents would show up at the hospital gates. After that, he assumed they were dead.
Now, he wasn’t so sure.
• • •
Shep and Cara took their time getting back. They’d taken a shortcut to get to Muddy Waters, and they weren’t expected at River’s Edge until sundown. While Shep thought about his parents, Cara pulled the protective cloth from around her head. Her dark skin glistened with sweat in the setting sun. They weren’t supposed to remove their protection until they were safely back. Shep would have to remind her to cover up before they were within sight of the compound.
For the last few miles, Cara’s nose had been buried in a book. Shep stared at the faded cover.
“Whatcha reading?” he asked.
“A Wrinkle in Time,” Cara answered, not looking up.
Shep laughed. “That’s a funny title. What does it mean?”
Cara rolled her eyes. “It’s a way to travel between two distant points in a second.”
“I don’t get it,” Shep said, shaking his head.
With exaggerated patience, Cara ripped a blank page from the back of the book and held it so the long side was horizontal. “Let’s say you wanted to get from here,” she tapped the left corner of the page, “to here.” She tapped the right corner. Then she ran her finger along the length of paper that connected the two points. “Normally, you’d have to travel all this way to get from one corner to another. But if you put a wrinkle in time ...” She folded the paper so the two opposite corners touched. “You can get there in a second.”
“Still don’t get it.”
Cara crumpled up the paper and threw it aside. “You’d have to read it to get it.”
Shep looked away quietly.
They continued on in silence. Shep’s mind wandered. As they passed the sumac trees, a sign they were nearing River’s Edge, Cara put her book away.
“What are you gonna do?”
Cara’s question snapped Shep out of his daze. “What?”
“About your parents. What are you gonna do?”
Shep ground his teeth. He hadn’t stopped thinking about that since they rode off from Muddy Waters. All those hours, reliving the night his parents vanished, and he still didn’t have an answer.
“I’ll talk to Doctor St. John,” he said slowly, testing to see if those were really the words he wanted.
Cara grunted. She’d only been living at River’s Edge a month and already knew, like Shep, that talking to the doctor was never the best option. “Don’t you mean you’ll talk to Vargas?”
“My dad’s an animal doctor,” he said. “He’s valuable.”
Value was the only way into River’s Edge. You had to prove your worth. Shep had only gotten in because of his skill with horses, which the doctor had made him prove with several grueling hours of riding. Cara had watched her parents drown in the river. When she showed up at the doors a month ago, she had no skills. But the doctor was known to have a soft spot for young girls.
“What if St. John says no?”
For as young as she was, Cara could be blunter than most adults Shep knew. He couldn’t say he liked riding with Cara. She didn’t talk much. When she did, it was rarely anything positive. When they first met, he’d tried thinking of her as a sister he never had. He ended up thinking of her more like a rabid badger.
“He won’t,” Shep said, but his tone betrayed that he didn’t believe it himself.
Cara shook her head and said, “Even if you could get to your parents, I can’t believe you’d bring them back here.” She nodded ahead to where River’s Edge was coming into view.
