The Eleventh Plague 210-280

He returns back to the barn to find it engulfed in flames. Stephen scatters to find Jenny in the flaming mass. He enters the barn and the inside was falling apart and smoke filled the whole building. He covered his mouth and nose and went to search for Jenny. He finds her under some fallen wood that is still burning. He tries to pick it up but it burns his hands so then he tries again and moves it off of her. He loads her up on his shoulder and carries her out through the fire and smoke. She wakes up and tells them that she did not recognize the people that did this. Stephen then goes back into the fire to grab some things. He reaches for his grandfathers rifle but the barrel and metal was way to hot so he sees Jenny's sketch pad and grabs it and makes a run for it. He jumps through the walls and wakes up and attends to Jenny's wounds she got from the burning log. They then move back to town and find a huge commotion going about. He goes in talks to Marcus and Violet who tell him that they are going to war with Fort Leonard and that they should go to a safe place. Violet tells them they need to go to the old casino outside of town. They make their way down there and get their things settled in. They talk about all of the things going on around them and how they could fix it. Then while sitting inside around the fire he notices it starts to snow outside. He goes out into the snow and walks a little ways admiring all the sights around him. He then returns to find Violet trying to sneak into the the Casino and she went there to tell Stephen that his dad had passed away. He is sad and goes to his dad at Violet's house and grabs him to go bury him. He digs him a grave in the ice cold ground and struggles for hours. Jenny comes to help and they finish the hole together and bury his dad. He covers it and returns back to the Casino. One night Jenny and Stephen hear something outside of the casino so they wait and listen and go see what it was. Two men in all black and with rifles are scouting the area. They follow them to a whole group of Slavers that they thought must of been sent by Fort Leonard to take out Settler's Landing. They go to warn the people of the slavers that where about to take over but learn that it was them that hired them to take care of Fort Leonard. Outraged he tells them of the bad things that could happen to their town and how they are not better than the people that came before them. Some people agree but Caleb who was in charge still wanted to go through with the plan. Jackson joins with Stephen and Jenny to go slow down the movements of the slavers. He notices the man with the scar that he and his dad saw in their first encounter with the slavers. Jenny runs in the middle of camp yelling Japanese nonsense and during that Stephen made a run for a bag full of grenades and threw them and blew up the whole camp setting fire to a lot of the stuff and disabling one of the two jeeps. They return to town to find a whole war was being fought. The town turned on the slavers and were fighting them. Stephen helps Violet patch some people up and sees Will Henry on the ground bloody and dying. This makes him sad even though he hated Will. He then finds Marcus and friends pinned down in a ditch taking fire from the front he tells them they are pinned down and they need to flank the enemy. He sees the other jeep in the woods and he planned on getting it. Stephen, Jenny, and Jackson go back to Henry's farm to release the animals as a distraction. Everybody runs off leaving a couple trampled but the man on the scar still remained on the jeep. Stephen chokes him out for awhile but the he gets choked out and before he passed out he heard a bang. When he woke up he saw Jackson's rifle by his body. They go back into the town and the people ran off all of the slavers. They put out all the fires they could that had engulfed much of the town from the fight. Couple months later he Stephen spends his time helping the young ones learn in school on the weekends due to Mr. Tuttles injuries from the fight. He teaches a girl not to be shy around others when she reads out loud. Stephen then talks to Jenny who got enough money for a horse and rifle and tells her he wants to go with her traveling. He packs his stuff and gets ready when he looks back at all of the things he was leaving. Jenny tells him to stay and help the community because he fought for this place so now it is his home. Stephen then entertained the new thought in his head....a home