The Eleventh Plague

“We lowered Grandpa into the grave and then, before I could even pull the ropes out, Dad began filling it in again. I knew I should stop him. We could have traded Grandpa’s ring for food, new clothes, even bullets. Dad knew that as well as I did.”

This passage immediately establishes the tension between emotion and survival in the novel. Stephen’s father operates on emotion, while Stephen—accustomed to a life of danger and conditioned into practicality by it—forces emotion out of his decisions as much as possible. However, there are limits even to Stephen’s practicality: The ring’s associations with abuse outweigh its potential value as a bargaining chip, preventing both Stephen and his father from repurposing it and highlighting The Lingering Effects of Abuse.

“If there was any group we avoided the most, it was [the enslavers]. Some were ex-military, others were just brutal scum. We saw them skulking around the edges of the trade gatherings like a bad disease. They mostly kept to themselves, but as far as we knew, they ranged throughout the country taking whoever they could and selling them to scattered militia groups, the few surviving plantation owners down south, or even the Chinese.”

This passage quickly establishes the brutality of the post-Collapse world, including its rampant dehumanization of others. The enslavers are characterized as people who once had power over others and continue to abuse it by treating people as property. At the same time, Stephen’s casual generalization about “the Chinese” participating in the trade of enslaved people suggests his own dehumanization of others. The struggle to survive discourages empathy and allows particularly cruel people to exploit others.

“I scrambled to catch [the keys] but the woman sprang up behind me and pushed me down, snatching the keys out of the air. There was a boom, deafening in the steel walls of the plane, as the man’s gun rang out. Thank God he was drunk. The bullet missed Dad by inches and slammed into the ground.”

This scene establishes the intense individualism—verging on selfishness—that is common among the novel’s characters, developing the theme of Individualism Versus Communalism as Survival Strategies. Each person is completely focused on their own survival to the detriment of others; altruism often ends in death, as is the case with Stephen’s father.