Plague Year

Chapter One

I may have been the first person in Ridgewood to see Bran Slocum. It was the first Saturday in October, about seven o'clock in the morning. The sun was turning the edges of the hills outside of town orange, and some wisps of mist were still rising from the damp ground. I was up and outside at that ungodly hour, pounding the sidewalk and sweating in the chilly air, mainly because of Molly Pepper.

I'd been dating Kristin Matthis since about the middle of the summer, and when Kristin made the cheerleading squad, Molly, who takes better care of my social life than I do, pointed out that it wasn't reasonable for a cheerleader to date Watson the Wimp. If I wanted to keep Kristin, I had to become a jock. The problem was that I'm tall and skinny ("free of excess body fat," Molly said) and have these really long arms and legs. I'm not crazy about heavy body contact, so football was out. it was the wrong season for basketball even if I could shoot baskets, which I can't.

But I can run. I'm not fast, but I have terrific endurance. Once I get started, I can run practically forever. So Molly insisted I try out for the cross-country track team, and I did, just to keep her off my back. To my surprise, I made it. There have to be at least five runners on a cross-country team if the school wants to compete officially and get ranked. Only four of the guys who tried out were fast, and none of them could go as far as I could, so Coach Morelli took me on in the hope that he could find some way to increase my speed. That's why I was out that Saturday morning. Coach had given me a stopwatch to time my runs. I wassupposed to try to take a few seconds off my time every day, running the same course.

You've heard of that movie, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner? I've never seen it, but the title's right on. Long-distance running isn't the kind of thing you do in groups. I mean, who else in their right mind would leave a nice, warm bed and an X-rated dream about Miss October to put on some holey sweats and runthrough the empty weekend-morning neighborhoods of Ridgewood, New York?

I'd been running half an hour, and I hadn't seen a single person except an old lady who was standing on her porch in her bathrobe, waiting for her pug dog to finish his business in her rhododendrons. That's why I particularly noticed when a cab drove past me, going real slow, and pulled up in front of a tired-looking, aluminum-sided two-story house down almost where Larch Street ends at the back of Ridge Lawn Cemetery.

My route takes me through the cemetery because, the gravel road is better for running than sidewalks, if you watch out for the ruts and dips, and because it looks terrific in there in the fall, when the leaves are changing. That's something you can't say about the neighborhood in general. Or most of Ridgewood for that matter.

I kept on running toward the cab as its back door opened and somebody heaved a duffle bag out onto the sidewalk and then climbed out after it. He must not have heard me coming. He reached into the cab and grabbed a backpack, swung it over his shoulder, and then backed right into me, as I started to swerve to avoid the duffle.

In the moment it took to get my balance and avoid falling, I got a good look at him. He seemed about my age, shorter than me by a couple of inches, but built better, with good shoulders and a tough-looking body. His hair was an ordinary sort of brown, but so long he'd tied it into a ponytail that hung a good six inches down the back of his jeans jacket. He had two rolled red and white bandannas tied around his neck. And he had an earring in one ear. You couldn't miss it. It was a big gold hoop.

He grunted when we hit, and turned toward me, his face startled-scared. For just a minute, he was like an animal in the middle of the road when your headlights hit it, eyes wide and terrified. Then he blinked, and it was as if he'd slipped a mask on. His face went blank.

"Sorry," I muttered. He frowned at me. At least I think he was frowning at me. It was hard to tell. His right eye was off somehow, angled sort of over my shoulder, while the other seemed to bore into my forehead. His mouth was a straight, tight line. "Sorry," I said again, though it hadn't really been my fault.

Still frowning, he settled his backpack more firmly onto his shoulder and I turned away and started running again. I glanced back over my shoulder once, and saw a balding guy with a paunch come out of the house and start down toward the kid, who was paying the cab driver, and then I ran on.

By the time I was through the service gate and onto the cemetery's gravel road, I'd just about forgotten the whole thing, watching the coils of mist that were rising from among the headstones like anemic ghosts.

I'd been running through the cemetery every day, and I don't think I'd ever thought about the dead people. But that morning, I had a couple of second thoughts. When I came out the main gate and checked the stopwatch, I saw that I'd made it through in record time. Not great time for cross-country maybe, but great for me.