“I am not here to please your every whim.” Pestilence’s voice is steady, unfeeling. “I am here to end the world.”
Chapter 18
It takes three days for plague to kill a man. Four, if you’re particularly unlucky.
This family is particularly unlucky.
I don’t know if this is simply nature at work, or if Pestilence is pulling the strings (either to punish me for pissing him off, or to “compromise” with me and give this family a bit longer to live).
It takes four long, agonizing days of sickness before the entire family passes. Mother, father, son and daughter. All of them taken by this stupid, senseless plague.
Four days I lingered in that house at Pestilence’s insistence while I recovered, four days the horseman made himself scarce, four days that I cared for the family—against their wishes. They wished me gone. At least, they did until they were too weak to take care of themselves.
“Why is he doing this?” the woman, Helen, asked me the day before she died.
I knelt next to her side of the bed. “I don’t know.”
“Why did he save you?” she pressed.
“I tried to kill him,” I explained. “He’s keeping me alive so that he can punish me.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she murmured. “He might have his reasons, but I don’t think punishment is one of them.”
My skin prickled at her words, and for the first time, I felt some uncertainty at my situation.
Why else would the horseman keep me around if not to punish me?
I recalled the torture I’d endured, and my uncertainty vanished. Helen simply didn’t know what Pestilence put me through. That was all.
Of all the members of this family, it’s the father who goes first. He was a big, burly guy who was built like a tank, and out of all of them, I would’ve thought he’d have held out the longest. Instead, in the early hours of the fourth day, he closed his eyes, gave one final, rattling cough, and passed on in the big bed he shared with his wife.
By the time he died, Helen was too sick to move him from the bed. I managed to drag his sore-riddled body from it, but Helen wouldn’t let me remove him from the room.
“The children shouldn’t see him … like that,” she weakly protested.
So I dragged him into the master bathroom, and Helen had to lay mere meters from his cooling, rotting corpse. And even though she was succumbing to her own death by then, she lived long enough to realize the horror of it.
Their son went next. Before he died, I brought him into his parents’ room, so that Helen could hold him as he passed.
She followed two hours later.
The last one to go was Stacy, their tiny daughter who died wearing unicorn pajamas, laying under a sky of glow-in-the-dark stars. She’d called out to her mom as fever took her, cried for her dad when the opened sores along her body hurt more than she could bear.
I held her hand and stroked her hair the entire time, pretending to be her mother so that in her confusion she’d at least know some peace. And then she went like the rest of her family. Quietly. Like stepping out of one room and into another, her chest rising and falling slower and slower until it stopped rising at all.
That was twenty minutes ago. Or maybe it was an hour. Time plays tricks on you when you least expect it.
I sit at the side of Stacy’s bed and hold her hand even after I know she’s gone. I’ve seen enough during my time as a firefighter to develop a thick skin, but this … this is something else altogether.
She was just a child. And she died last, with no one but an ex-firefighter to see her out of this world.
Behind me, the door creaks opens.
“It’s time to go,” Pestilence says at my back.
I brush a few stray tears from my cheeks. Placing Stacy’s hand on her chest, I rise, heading to where he stands in the doorway.
I step so close to him I can feel his body heat.
“Why do you have to take the children?” I whisper hoarsely.
His hand falls to my shoulder, steering me out of the room. “You’d prefer a slow death for them, is that it?”
“I’d prefer for them not to die at all.”
“What do you think will happen, human, once their families die off? Once these kids are all alone? Think they can hunt for themselves? Forage for themselves?”
All my retorts are like rocks in my mouth, rolling over one another. In the end, I just glare at him.
“See,” he says, “you yourself know my words to be true, even if you despise them.”
“Why do you have to kill at all?” I say as he leads me down the hall.
“Why did you have to ruin the world?” the horseman retorts.
“I didn’t.”
“You did. Just as I don’t have to touch each man to kill him, nor do you have to personally light the world on fire to be the reason it burns.”
I rub my eyes. Every time we talk, I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall, hurting myself and getting nowhere for all my effort.
“Why does it have to be so God-awful?” I whisper. “The lumps, the sores …”
“It’s plague. It’s not supposed to be enjoyable.”
He leads me outside where Trixie waits, the saddle bags laden with goods lifted from this house. Seeing all the odds and ends tucked away, I feel like a grave robber, looting from the dead. I know they no longer need food and jackets, but I still can’t shake the wrongness of it all.
Woodenly, I get on the horse, Pestilence joining me a moment later. And just like that, the two of us leave the house and its tragic former occupants behind.
We’ve barely gone a kilometer when the horseman fishes a wrapped sandwich from one of the saddlebags and hands it to me. “You haven’t eaten,” he explains.
I turn the item over and over in my hand. “Did you … make this for me?”
“I like the taste of jam. I thought you might as well.”
So, yes, he did make it for me. The same man that just delivered death made me a sandwich because he noticed I hadn’t eaten.
I pinch my eyes shut and draw in a long breath. Why does this have to be so complicated? Why can’t he just stay in the nice little box in my mind labeled “Evil” and that be that? These brief flashes where he’s considerate and tender, they’re slowly breaking me.
Opening my eyes, I peel away the sandwich’s packaging, and sure enough, between the two coarse loaves of homemade bread is a generous helping of jam. And only jam.
It’s not lost on me how very similar this is to a pie—two bready surfaces holding a sugary fruit filling. I bring it to my mouth and bite into it.
It’s not bad. I don’t know why I thought it would be. Maybe I assumed jam sandwiches ought to taste wrong. Maybe I thought that after the day I’ve had, anything would taste like dirt in my mouth.
Instead it tastes like an indulgence. As I eat it, I imagine Pestilence in that cluttered little kitchen we just left, making this for me right next to the refrigerator-turned-icebox that was scattered with stick-figure artwork and alphabet magnets. All while, down the hall, I watched a little girl draw her last.
The sugary-sweet taste of the sandwich sours in my mouth. I take a few deep breaths before I try another bite.
“I don’t like watching them die,” Pestilence admits behind me.
I lower the sandwich.
He’d been all but absent during those four days I stayed with the family. I thought perhaps there was some other reason for it.
“Why didn’t you force us to keep moving?” This could’ve been avoided if he didn’t linger in one place for any length of time.
“You needed the rest,” he replies.
Absently, I touch one of the bandages covering my wrists.
He’s only keeping me alive to punish me, I’d told Helen.
I don’t think so, she’d said. He might have his reasons, but I don’t think punishment is one of them.
I keep my thoughts to myself.
br />
“But you still infect them,” I say.
“I still infect them,” he agrees. “And I will continue to infect them until my time has passed. But I do not like watching them die.”
The two of us ride for the rest of the day, passing through a series of small, deserted settlements. My thighs have finally stopped being so saddle sore, and my back itches where my skin is healing.
The weather has also decided to give me a break, the weak winter sun shining brilliantly above us. It’s still colder than a witch’s tit, but hey, it’s not raining. I’ll take it.
The trees hedge the highway to our left, and to our right, the beautiful waters of the Howe Sound glitter. Speckled amongst them are a series of islands, and beyond those is the other edge of the mainland. The sight would take your breath away if not for the rows and rows of rusted cars sitting between me and the view.
The dead automobiles lay abandoned on either side of the road. This must be one of the sites still waiting on the government-funded clean up. The Arrival that knocked out the majority of our power also stranded thousands upon thousands of people in their cars in the middle of open road.
If I close my eyes, I can still see some of the gruesome images of the pileups, cars smashed to smithereens with their occupants still inside. We no longer talk about that first wave of fatalities, not since Pestilence reappeared, but so many, many people died that first day—from car crashes, from planes falling out of the sky, from life-supporting machines giving out, and so many strange scenarios no one ever saw coming.
Around me, the rusted cars sit as sad reminders of the day the world changed. Pestilence doesn’t spare them a glance. He and Trixie only have eyes for the horizon.
We ride throughout the day, not even stopping to eat. I come to find that’s because Pestilence made me not one but three jam sandwiches and packed me a jar of artichoke hearts and a can of anchovies. I don’t have it in me to tell him that he’s not going to want to sit anywhere near me if I actually crack that can of fish open.
Then again, I could get him to try the fish … we’d see just how well he enjoyed human food then.
It’s not until the sky is a deep blue that we turn off the highway. Pestilence passes several houses, some darkened and others with oil lamps burning bright inside, before we finally head up the driveway of some unlucky soul’s home.
The screen door bangs open and closed with the wind, making an eerie, squealing noise. And now that I’m looking for it, I notice that the windows are boarded up. It’s clear that whoever lived here, they haven’t for a long time.
Sights like this aren’t uncommon. Maybe the well on the property dried up or the pump stopped working, maybe the house was too far from civilization now that cars were obsolete. Maybe a relative took the previous owners in, or maybe they died and no one wanted to buy this house in the middle of nowhere. The stories behind homes like this one are all different, but they all lead to the same fate—abandonment.
I hear there are entire ghost towns where people once lived but do no longer. Las Vegas, Dubai, …
The thought of all those once opulent cities sitting like bones in the desert, their glittery attractions dulled with dust and falling into disrepair, sends a shiver down my spine.
Death hath reared himself a throne, in a strange city, lying alone … Poe’s words ring out in my mind.
My attention returns to the home in front of us. I don’t like watching them die, Pestilence had said. A part of me thinks that maybe that’s why he chose this place.
The horseman tends to Trixie while I enter the home. As soon as I step inside, I pat the darkened wall until I find a light switch. Once I find it, I flick it on, ever hopeful that this house will have electricity.
For one blinding moment the entryway flares bright with light. Then, with a shattering pop, the light disappears just as suddenly as it came.
“Shit.”
I guess I should be thankful the damage isn’t worse. I’ve had to put out more electrical fires than wildfires over the last few years. All these creature comforts are on the fritz.
Pestilence comes in behind me, already unfastening his heavy armor. He drops his bow and quiver on a nearby side table, then each piece of his armor. Lastly, he sets his crown down, running a hand through his hair.
It’s all so very human. I wonder if he knows that.
“Light?” he asks.
“It doesn’t work.” I head over to another switch and flip it on and off. Nothing happens. “Nope, definitely doesn’t.”
I begin to grope around the living room, looking for candles, lamps, wicks, matches—anything that can illuminate this place now that the sun’s gone down. Pestilence heads back outside, leaving me to fumble alone.
He comes in a few minutes later, carrying several items. He passes me, setting his haul in what looks to be the kitchen.
I hear the hiss of a match being struck, and a moment later, he lights a lantern he must’ve picked up at one of the last houses we stayed in.
He hands the lantern to me, then walks down the home’s darkened hallway. I watch him go, listening as he opens and shuts another door. The muffled sound of a garage door being manually lifted drifts in, then the steady sound of hooves clicking against cement as he leads Trixie out of the elements.
I lift the lantern, looking around at the house. Half of the furniture is covered with ratty sheets, and what isn’t covered is blanketed in a thick coat of dust.
I walk over to the fireplace. There are still pictures sitting on the mantle. I pick up one, using my thumb to rub away a coat of dust. Beneath it is a portrait of a woman in her early twenties, her hair permed, frizzed and fluffed within an inch of its life. I choose another photo at random, dusting it off enough to see a group of squinty-eyed kids in bathing suits, floaties pushed high up on their arms.
I set it down as my gooseflesh rises. There’s an entire life here that appears to abruptly have stopped. Whether death or displacement took them, it took them swiftly.
Whole cities will look like this in the future.
It won’t just be Vegas and Dubai. It will be every place Pestilence visits. And in that dystopian future, someone like me will go from house to house, skirting around the decayed corpses that have been left unburied inside.
I shudder at the thought.
The door to the garage opens and shuts, and Pestilence’s heavy footfalls make their way back to the living room. When he appears, he has several dry logs with him. He eyes me before making his way over, beginning to stack the wood in the fireplace.
An hour later, a fire is going, a half a dozen candles are flickering around the living room, and a mattress and a few moth-eaten blankets have been dragged out from one of the closets and laid out in the living room so that I can sleep where it’s warm.
I sit on the mattress, knees pulled up under my chin, sipping water out of an old earthenware mug (the well still works) and staring into the flames. Next to me, Pestilence lounges against the mattress, his legs crossed in front of him.
“Why do you help them?” he asks.
His eyes find mine, the flames dancing in them. Even lit by fire, he looks like an angel.
The devil was also an angel.
“Help who?” I ask.
“That family. And the man before them.”
Is he serious?
I study his features, my heart unwillingly picking up speed because my body is an idiot that cannot discern evil mo-fo from hot male human.
“How can I not help them?” I finally say.
“You know they’re going to die anyway,” he says.
It’s such cold, pragmatic reasoning. Like the means to an end means nothing next to the end itself.
“So?” I glance back at the flames. “If I can ease their discomfort, then I will.”
I can feel his gaze on me, hotter than the fire.
“You don’t just do it to ease their pain, though, do you?” he says. “You also do it to ease your own.”
br /> What a clever little horseman he is.
I press my mouth together, frowning. “You’re right,” I say. “Suffering is for the living, and you have made me suffer.” Watching those children succumb, drowning in their own fluids, having to listen to their cries … “And how I despise you for it.”
“I expect nothing less from the human who burned me alive.”
I turn on him, my anger rising. “So it’s still about your suffering is it? You’ve wiped out entire cities, but at the end of the day you were hurt. You want to know something? I hunted you down like a fucking animal because you deserve it. And I would do it again and again and again.”
Would I though? A small, traitorous part of me isn’t so sure.
Undaunted by that thought, I continue. “You’re killing us all cruelly, and you hate us for it.”
He says nothing to my outburst, just sits there, studying me.
“Part of living,” I say, “is feeling pain, senseless pain.” I could tell him a thousand stories about the sheer unfairness of the world. But why bother? He doesn’t give a shit about our problems.
“I am what I am,” he says, resolute. He sounds almost … defeated. “I came here with a task, and I will see it completed.”
“Who gave you the task? God? The devil?” I throw my hand up in the air. “The fucking Easter Bunny? I thought you were Pestilence the Conqueror, not someone’s goddamned errand boy!”
“Careful, human,” he warns, his voice dangerous.
“Careful? If you’re so frightened of my words, then shut me up.”
I went too far. I know that as soon as I’ve spoken.
Pestilence raises his eyebrows at my challenge. A second later, he rips off a section of the dusty sheet that covers the nearby couch. Getting up, he twists the linen in his hands. The action looks ominous.
He kneels in front of me, his eyes meeting mine. And then he shoves the linen between my lips.
Never in my life has someone tried to gag me.
For a moment, I’m dumbfounded, but then the moment passes, and I’m a raging bull, dropping my mug of water and battling Pestilence as he ties the material securely behind my head. I don’t manage much more than slapping at his face before he grabs my shoulder and thrusts my head into the mattress. He presses his knee against my back.