I’m so ready to duke—it—out with Pestilence.
“Hmmm,” is all he says.
No scathing comments or smartass remarks. Just hmmm.
I could kill a bitch right now.
“What is it that you do to fill your days?” he asks.
I have to glance behind me to make sure I’m speaking to the same man who was taunting me literally seconds ago.
He stares at me, looking guileless.
I grimace. “Did,” I bite out. I don’t do anything at the moment, except (joyfully) slow the horseman down. (We all have to get our thrills somewhere.) Facing forward, I add, “I was a firefighter.”
His fingers drum against my waist. “Did you enjoy it?”
I lift a shoulder. “It was just a job. It didn’t define me.” Not the way it did some of my teammates, who’d dreamed of being firefighters their entire lives. I blow out a breath. “I always wanted to go to college and study English,” I confess. I don’t know why I’m admitting this.
“English?” Pestilence says quizzically. “But you speak it fine—if a little odd.”
“Not English as in the language itself,” I clarify, tipping back the last of the hot chocolate. I slide the thermos into one of the saddle bags. “English as in literature written in English. I wanted to study the works of Shakespeare and Lord Byron and,”—my favorite—“Poe.”
“Poe,” the horseman repeats, no doubt remembering the name from earlier. “Why didn’t you study these poets?”
Regret is a bitter taste at the back of my throat, and there’s no more hot chocolate to wash it out.
“Four horsemen came to earth and made a mess of the world.”
When we enter the town of Squamish, it’s just as abandoned as I hoped it might be.
We pass by a gas station whose pumps are rusty with years of disuse, but whose store is filled with rows of preserved produce, nuts, and sweets.
Farther in, recently installed gas lamps still burn, though the sun has been up for hours. The lamp lighter must’ve evacuated before they could extinguish the light.
Like the gas station’s store, the trading posts we pass are still full of goods, a sure sign that their owners fled before they had a chance to stow away their goods. As a result, a few of them have been broken into and robbed.
Beneath my layers of clothing, my skin pricks. This all could’ve happened hours ago, and yet, there’s not a single soul to be seen. It’s vastly unnerving to pass through a town that by all rights should be full of people. It feels … haunted.
What must Quebec and Ontario and all the rest of the provinces to the east look like now that Pestilence has passed through them? What must the U.S.’s East Coast look like now?
Whether you make it out of this alive or not, the world is never going to be the same.
Pestilence turns off the main road and begins weaving through the town, and I have no idea what his game plan is. It’s too early to squat in some poor soul’s home, and so far, that’s the only time the horseman ever leaves the main highway.
It’s not until we approach Squamish’s hospital that I start feeling uneasy.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Your feeble body needs amenities.”
I stare at the hospital with quickly rising horror. Amenities like gauze.
We’d run out of the linen wrappings this morning.
“I don’t need any more bandages,” I rush to say.
“Yes, you do.” Gentler, Pestilence says. “Do you really think it takes me going to the hospital for them all to die? Come now, Sara, I merely need to walk through a city to see its doom.”
I glance back at him. I know I should be processing his words, but I’m hung up on the fact that he actually said my name.
He continues on, dauntless. “Whether or not I enter a hospital, matters not. The humans will still fall, there especially.”
It’s not like what he’s saying is news to me, it’s just that I don’t want to see the faces of those too sick and feeble to flee, as death incarnate walks amongst them.
There’s a chance the town went to special lengths to remove the hospital’s patients. It’s possible. But it’s also possible that the weakest individuals were simply unable to evacuate.
I grab the horseman’s forearm as a thought comes over me. “A general store,” I say, like I’ve discovered the cure for cancer. “They will have bandages at a general store.”
Pestilence stares down at where I grip his arm. “Did you see a general store on our way here?”
“I saw at least three of them.” These days there’s a trading post or general store on every street corner, each one existing because they have some edge on the market.
The horseman squints at me. “And you think I should go there instead?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then it is settled,” he says with finality.
Was … was convincing him really that easy?
For an instant I almost believe it. But then Trixie Skillz keeps clomping forward, and the hospital looms ever closer.
“What about the general store?” I look over my shoulder at Pestilence.
His face is grim as it meets mine. “I mean to make you suffer.”
Chapter 15
Hospitals are always the first places to go. That’s the one thing all those movies got right. As soon as people began to get sick, they swarmed the medical facilities, thinking that surely modern medicine could cure this. Surely we were better off than the poor sods who caught Black Death. All those centuries we spent studying illnesses and conquering them—surely we were equipped by now to stop an epidemic.
We were wrong.
Pestilence hops off his horse, bow and quiver at his back, eyeing the building. This close to it, I can see a couple spooked faces staring out. One of them is a woman holding her rosary, her lips moving in prayer.
God’s not going to save you, I want to tell her. He’s the one who wants you dead.
Swiveling back to me, the horseman reaches for my waist. “Come, Sara, and gaze upon the faces of the soon-to-be departed.”
“I hate you,” I say as he lifts me off his steed.
“Ah, hate. Another distinctly human emotion.” He sets me down.
I don’t think it’s a distinctly human emotion—the horseman seems to have plenty of it himself.
He strides ahead of me to the double doors, looking like a gallant knight in his armor. For once in his retched life, he tries to open the doors the proper way. They don’t budge.
That’s not surprising; hospitals have lockdown procedures for this sort of thing.
The horseman rotates, his eyes meeting mine briefly, and they spark with defiance. In one rapid motion, he swivels back around. His fist shoots out, slamming into the door like a jackhammer.
With a groan, the double doors buckle inward, but, shockingly, they still hold fast. My heart pounds as I watch the horseman. This is a horror movie, one where the bad guy is getting inside the house to kill off all the kids. Only this is real life, movies are dead, and the horseman is a flesh and blood fiend.
His fist pounds into the door a second time with preternatural force, and with a metallic screech, the doors collapse inward.
Pestilence steps aside as hospital alarms begin to go off, his frightening gaze meeting mine. “After you.”
In some ways, the visit is not as bad as I feared it would be. In other ways, it’s worse. It’s too early for people to succumb to the Fever, so the few people inside were just your average bunch of hospital patients and staff. But all those terrified expressions … My stomach churns at the memory of them, as we head away from the hospital, the horseman’s precious fucking gauze loaded into the packs that hang on either side of Trixie’s saddle.
Pestilence made me look at each one of them. All those people slated for certain death. It would be a lie to say he enjoyed making me look—he was just as grim as I was—but does that really matter in the end? He still made me stare down those few people stuck inside, just because he knew it would hurt me.
“I hope you’re satisfied,” I say once the hospital is far behind us.