Rushing after him, I grab the doorknob. I twist it, but the door won’t open. The horseman must be holding it closed.
“Pestilence, let me go.” My voice rises with panic.
He doesn’t seriously mean to keep me here, does he?
“You will forgive me,” he says quietly from the other side of the door.
“Let me go!” I shout louder.
But he doesn’t.
Pestilence boards up the master bedroom windows and blockades all the doors leading out. Not before I rush outside a few times and he has to drag me back in, but eventually, he manages to bar all the exits, leaving me trapped inside.
And so I’m back to being his prisoner.
At least the horseman is smart enough to keep his distance. I only see him a few times throughout the rest of the day, when he drops off food and water, his eyes sad and haunted.
I think maybe whatever madness came over Pestilence will wear off. That he’ll eventually unbar the windows and open the door and beg for my forgiveness.
But it never happens. One day melts into the next, and he stays away, coming to me only so that he can feed me. Not even at night does he slip into my room to express his tortured feelings for me, or to fall asleep pressed against my back.
My body misses him, my heart misses him. The latter is dying away beneath my ribcage, hating his betrayals yet wanting him still.
I don’t try to escape. What’s the use? I can’t slip past Pestilence unnoticed.
I try not to think about all the millions of dead people that must be rotting right where they died. The T.V. stays off for that very reason. I can’t bear to watch the news and see all those bodies. Not when I played a role (albeit, unwittingly) in their deaths.
That leaves me to pilfer through the few books in the room or to recite poetry from memory.
Sometimes I can physically feel Pestilence’s presence nearby—listening to the sound of my voice, lingering outside my door. The air feels saturated with all the things left unspoken and unfinished between us. Things that have been left to decay alongside all those dead bodies.
Life goes on like this for days, and then a whole week.
Is this truly going to become our new normal? Pestilence keeping me like a caged bird, fated neither to die nor to fully live?
When the door opens on day eight, Pestilence looks beaten down. His blue eyes are dim, and his golden-blond hair doesn’t have its usual luster.
“I cannot do this anymore,” he admits. “I surrender.”
I freeze where I sit on the bed.
Pestilence the Conqueror, surrendering?
He removes his crown from his head and tosses it on the floor between us. “It’s yours,” he says bitterly. “I may have laid claim to the world, but I’ve lost you, the only thing I ever really wanted.”
My pulse gallops as I stare first at the discarded crown, then up at the man who wore it.
“You are free to leave,” he says. “I will not stop you.”
His eyes are bleak. Gone are the shadows in his eyes, but so is whatever spark of hope once laid in them. When they touch mine, he looks at me like he’s drowning.
I should feel exalted, vindicated in some small way, but it’s just one more pain to add to the rest.
For several seconds I don’t move.
“Damnit, Sara, if you want your freedom, leave before I come to my senses.”
I slide off the bed, grabbing my things one by one, keeping a wary eye on him. I half expect him to slam the door shut in my face at any moment. This must be some trick.
But it doesn’t appear to be.
I step past the threshold to the room, pausing to face him.
“Go, and join your doomed race,” he says, his gaze reluctantly meeting mine. How it now blisters! He has pain to match my own. “But don’t expect me to kill you.”
Too late, it seems, he’s figured out the meaning of mercy.
After everything Pestilence has done, I don’t expect my leaving to hurt me so bad. I thought my heart had been abused enough to forget that it belongs to the horseman.
I was wrong.
I don’t look at Pestilence when I leave him at the house’s entrance. Walking away from him pains me enough. Seeing whatever emotion fills his face might make me waver. The horseman no longer wears his crown. It still lays, forgotten, in the bedroom.
I head for the street, each step cutting me deeper and deeper. I’ve lost everything else—family, friends, neighbors. Leaving Pestilence is going to bleed out the last parts of me.
Where should I go? How many kilometers will I have to walk to get to the living? Will I die before then? I know Pestilence won’t allow me to succumb to plague, but there are other ways to die. I could starve, I could perish from the elements.
And if I don’t die, what then?
One step at a time, Burns.
It’s only once I reach the road that I turn back around. The mansion we’ve been staying in perches on a small rise. Standing like a sentinel at its threshold is the horseman.
Pestilence watches me, his face solemn. For a moment, I think I see hope spark in his eyes.
He thinks I’m changing my mind.
Steeling myself, I face the street once more and walk away.
Chapter 52
I don’t hear the news. Not for weeks and weeks.
Still, I should’ve known. The truth was so obviously in front of me.
Instead it takes an outpost owner near the Canadian border to convince me beyond a shadow of a doubt.
“That blighted horseman’s gone. I swear it on the newly dead, he is,” the man says, leaning on the pine countertop as he adds up my things.
The sight of the man himself, alive and bustling about his store, is surprising enough, but then again, I’ve ran into others on my way back up the coast. I assumed their presence had to do with Pestilence spreading his plague solely southward.
Now I stare at the store owner, his news not computing.
The world thought Pestilence was gone when we were holed up inside that mansion, but once I left, I assumed that he’d resume his travels.
“You mean there haven’t been any new sightings of him?” I ask dumbly.
He shakes his head.
No new sightings of him. An unpleasant sensation twists my gut, but I can’t say what causes it.
Maybe there’s no longer anyone left alive to spot him. The territory from Washington to California is vast … vast and full of the dead.
“Have you not heard?” the owner asks when he notices my surprise.
“Last news I received was that Oregon, California, and parts of Mexico were infected,” I say. Even now a chill slides through me at the thought. I played a role in that.
The man lets out a wheezy laugh, pulling a slim case from beneath his counter. Opening it, he takes the raw ingredients from inside and begins to hand roll a cigarette. “Oh, you’ve missed so much.”
Intentionally.
I made a habit of avoiding small talk like this, the guilt its own sort of illness. But now that we’re on the subject of Pestilence, a sick sort of curiosity comes over me. I find I need to know how much of the world still lives—and how my horseman fared.
Hearing that Pestilence hasn’t resurfaced since I left him …
The loss feels physical, like a limb’s been lopped off.
The outpost owner finishes rolling his cigarette, licking the edge of the white paper to seal the seam closed. “Pleased to tell you that all the sick recovered.” He shakes his head. “Damn miracle it is.” The man strikes a match and holds the flame to the end of his smoke, inhaling a grateful drag. “I’m not a praying man myself, but even I sent one up when I heard the news. Thought He’d left us to die.”
Wait—what?
I stare at him in shock.
All the sick recovered.
Can’t seem to catch my breath.
“You mean … all of those sick—they … lived?” I say incredulously.
&nb
sp; It cannot be. I was with the horseman. I saw his anger, witnessed his unbending will.
No way had he changed his mind.
“Yep,” the man says cheerily enough, blowing smoke out the side of his mouth. “Even us up north here recovered—news didn’t bother mentioning that.” He frowns, like that’s some great travesty when oh my God, all those millions lived.
“Fucking plague came back right as I was re-opening my store,” he continues. “Thought I’d caught my death.”
There’s a pain in my chest that’s equal parts joy and anguish. I don’t want to believe him because if I’ve misunderstood, the disappointment might crush me alive.
I brace my hands on the countertop as I sway a little.
My God.
Pestilence retracted his plague. I don’t know how, but he did.
He must’ve done it while I was confined to that damn room. I’d thought the worst of him then, and all the while he was curing the plague he’d brought down upon the masses.
The only thing besides his love that I ever wanted. He gave it to me.
Had I but turned on the fucking T.V. I would’ve seen this.
Pestilence stopped the plague, and still I left him.
I swallow back a choked cry.
Why didn’t he tell me? By God, that would’ve changed everything.
“And the Fever,” I ask, somehow finding my voice, “has it spread since then?”
Have to be sure I understand this correctly.
The outpost owner frowns, considering my words. “Not that I’ve heard, though who knows where the world’s at these days? It hasn’t been back around these parts, and that’s good enough for me.”
I thank the man for the news and walk away from the outpost in a daze.
My last encounter with Pestilence fills my mind.
I surrender, he’d said, casting his crown aside.
He had already reversed the plague by then.
I may have laid claim to the world but I’ve lost you, the only thing I ever really wanted.
Why didn’t he say anything? Did he think I was watching the news in that room, that I’d learned that he’d cured them all and still decided to walk away?
These thoughts are gutting me. Because I’m still in love with Pestilence, and now, after vindicating himself, he’s gone.
Chapter 53
By the time I return to my hometown of Whistler, I hear enough reports and firsthand accounts to believe the incredible.
The plague really did disappear over the course of days.
Just … poof, gone, and the horseman with it. I try not to think about that. My heart aches enough as it is.
I learn that, like me, people didn’t believe the news—not at first, at least. Weeks without incident had to pass before anyone dared to hope that the Messianic Fever was truly over and that the horseman had vanished.
Then people began to hope—in that ridiculous way we do—that other things would return to the way they once were. That electricity would begin to work as it ought, that batteries would hold a charge and perhaps even the Internet would eventually come back.
They hoped in vain.
The world never went back to the way it was. I doubt it ever will.
Without the horseman by my side, no one recognizes me as the girl he kept. Despite the few blurry photos that once circulated, not a single person has connected the dots.
When I finally arrive home, I get a hero’s welcome—the firefighter who took a stand against the horseman, the woman they all thought long dead.
My father holds me for a long time, and my mother openly weeps. I’m blubbering like a baby when I see them both alive.
Plague never got them.
Our reunion is touching and ridiculous and beautiful, and I just fucking love my parents.
When I return to the fire station, Luke is the first one to see me. It’s almost comical, the way the shock registers on his face.
“Holy motherfucking shit! Burns!” He nearly overturns the chair he sits in when he sees me. “You’re alive!”
“So are you!”
It’s startling to see him after all this time. He looks a little leaner, not that I should be surprised. Living through a Canadian winter post-Arrival is difficult enough. Living through a Canadian winter in the frozen wilderness is near impossible. And that’s what he and all these other survivors had to do to escape the plague.
Luke’s exclamation draws the attention of others, who are soon thumping me on the back and pulling me into hugs, Felix among them. They all escaped with their lives, all of them except for …
“Briggs?” I ask, my eyes searching for him.
Could just be his day off.
Someone sobers up. “Didn’t make it.”
“He … didn’t?” My mood plummets. I was supposed to be the one that kicked the bucket, not him.
Surely he had enough time to escape.
“They needed help at the hospital. He came back early to aid the sick.”
And he died for it.
The more I look around, the more I notice other missing men. “Who else?”
“Sean and Rene. Blake. Foster.”
So many.
“All died in the line of duty,” someone else adds.
I should’ve known. First responders will always put their lives on the line for others.
I get that itchy feeling beneath my skin. It should’ve been me. A dozen times over it should’ve.
Pestilence stopped the plague altogether because of you, a quiet voice whispers at the back of my mind. Of course, that thought comes with its own strange pain.
“How did you escape the horseman?” Felix asks.
They’re all looking at me.
I’ve dreaded this question since I realized there would be survivors in Whistler. There’s so much I have to answer for, and I don’t know what to include and how much to say.
So I keep it simple. “The horseman … showed me mercy.”
Surprisingly, life returns to normal. Or at least, as normal as I can expect these days.
I move back into my apartment, though I spend an agonizing few weeks carting my belongings from my parents’ house—where they were brought when I was presumed dead—back to my place.
In the wake of my return, people have questions—so many questions.
How did you survive the horseman?
Where have you been all these months?
Why did it take you so long to come home?
For most people, I get good at non-answers. For those who matter, I give them half-truths. At some point, I can’t not; the truth is suffocating the life out of me.
But even then, I don’t share everything—like how I fell in love with a monster, or how in the end, he saved all our miserable lives. How I recited poetry to him and felt him change from a nightmare to a man.
I can’t shake the loneliness I now feel. I first noticed it on the road home, when I bunked in abandoned houses or trekked over kilometers of unbroken snow. And now that I’m home, it seems to rush in from all sides. I’m drowning in my loneliness and no amount of company can banish the sensation.
Not even this, however, can compare to the horrible feeling of falling back into an old life when everything is now different. Like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I hate it, but there’s nothing better for me anywhere else, and so I stay here in this drab apartment, and each day I go to the fire station and pretend I’m okay when I’m not.
I’m really not.
Sometimes my mind wanders to what impossibilities might have been if Pestilence were a human man. What it would be like to be with him without the baggage. But then, if he were human, Pestilence wouldn’t be Pestilence, so I guess it doesn’t do to ponder the possibility.
Some things are just not meant to be, I suppose.
Now, glass of homebrewed and very suspect wine in hand, I reread a much loved book of mine. Pre-Pestilence, I might’ve flipped through my collection of Shakespeare or Lord By
ron (hardcore lit bitch right here), but the greats are ruined for me. Particularly Poe. His dark soul and macabre heart are too similar to mine.
A knock at the door has me setting my book aside.
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
Shut up, Poe, no one asked for your commentary.
I might legit be losing my mind.
Standing, I glance from the wine in my hand to the shotgun propped against the edge of the couch. I got two hands, and I need one to open the door, so what will it be—the gun or the wine?
Tough decision. Night visitors are always suspect, and I’m not super trusting these days, but … in the end, wine.
Glass in hand, I open my front door.
“Sara.”
I drop the wine, the sound of shattering glass barely registering.
Pestilence fills the doorway, his golden-blond hair framing his face like a corona. His crown is gone, his bow is gone, his golden armor is gone. Even his clothes are different, not dark and pristine. He wears a flannel shirt and jeans, and on his feet are scuffed human boots.
“Pestilence,” I breathe, my heart thundering.
Can’t be real.
“I am Pestilence no longer,” he says, continuing to stand there, not daring to come any closer.
It’s so unbearably hard, staring at him. He still looks like an angel, even in human clothes. Will he ever not look like a divine thing?
But it’s more than his sheer beauty. It took a long time to admit to myself just how far I fell for him. Too late I realized that I loved everything about him—his heart, his mind, his very essence. But even as I realized it, I mourned it because, by then, he was gone.
And now I don’t know what to do, whether to close the distance between us or keep away from him. I don’t know in what state he’s coming to me.
I left him … a broken thing.
I bite the inside of my cheek. “They said you just disappeared.”
He searches my face, and maybe I’m just imagining it, but he looks like he’s trying to memorize each one of my features.
“I can do many things, Sara, but disappearing isn’t one of them.”