“You were hypothermic.”
Oh. Of course. That would be the logical sequence of events. Not screwing the world’s most hated being. Because that would be so far out of the question that—
Why am I even dwelling on this?
I gather the blankets around me, clutching them against me, and sit up with as much modesty as I can manage.
“Where are we?”
Pestilence sits up next to me, and now it really looks like the two of us were up to some hanky-panky.
“In a house,” he replies.
Ask a silly question …
In the distance I hear hushed voices.
“No you can’t go out there.”
“But I’m hungry.”
“Is that really the horseman?”
“I want to pet his horse!”
“Go back to your rooms, both of you.”
Little feet pitter patter against the floor.
My stomach contracts. Children. That’s right. I rub the heel of my hand against one of my eyes, willing the last twenty-four hours to just go away.
Children. Under the same roof as Pestilence.
“Don’t let them die,” I whisper.
“Everyone dies, Sara.”
I close my eyes. Everything hurts so damn much. My body, my heart, my mind.
They’re going to die.
I twist to face him, pressing the blanket close to me. It has racecars printed all over it. A little boy’s blanket, sacrificed so that I’d be warm. Sometimes it’s the little details that cut the deepest.
“Honestly,” I say, “that is the biggest load of horseshit I’ve heard from you.”
He squints at me. “Every human dies,” he amends, completely missing my point.
“It doesn’t mean they need to die today!” I hiss, trying to keep my voice down for the family’s sake.
“They won’t. They still have at few days yet.”
Suddenly I can’t look at him, and I can’t stand to be near him.
He’s going to kill children. Children.
Of course, he already has killed children. Thousands upon thousands of them. But now the reality of it is being shoved in my face and I can’t stand it.
Wordlessly, Pestilence hands me a pile of clothes, undoubtedly something he swiped from the owner’s. This might just be the worst part of the whole thing. The horseman can think to collect clothes for me even as he lets his damnable plague kill kids.
Pestilence settles back on his forearms, watching me as I dress, his eyes not quite as disinterested in my body as they were the last time he saw it.
I must be imagining things.
I finally meet his gaze. “Change your mind.”
“No.”
My jaw clenches as I stare at him, my eyes accusing. He meets my gaze unflinchingly.
“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.