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.”
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.
I buck against him madly, trying to shake him off, but he’s more solid than simple flesh and blood, and my efforts get me nowhere.
Behind me I hear another rip, and then he’s grabbing my wrists and looping the material around them.
I’m shrieking into the makeshift gag.
“Oooooouuu muuufffuughhrrr!” I roar.
He binds my wrists tight. Once he’s finished, he sits me up and squats in front of me.
Mistake.
I lift my foot and slam it into his pretty-boy face.
He rocks back, catching my ankle between his hands. “Do I need to bind these too?”
“Ullll uuuuggghinnnn eeeenngggh ooooouuuuu!”
He holds my foot hostage, waiting for me like I’m a toddler having an unreasonable tantrum.
I give my foot a few useless jerks before I give up. This guy makes few empty threats, and I’m not all that interested in being completely restrained.
When I stop fighting him, he releases my foot, reaching a hand up to his face to rub it where I clocked him.
“You hit solidly for a human—I’ll give you that.”
“Uuuuugh oooo, aaaahuuulll.”
“I’m surprised you’re this mad; you’re the one who suggested silencing you.”
I shriek again.
“Calm yourself, little human. Maybe then I’ll release you.”
Little?
He goes back to his side of the fire and loses himself in the flames.
I sit there, across from him, seething, my breath coming out in hot, ragged pants.
Next chance I get, I’ll kick him in his holy balls.
Some unnamable amount of time goes by like that, the two of us sitting close but mentally leagues apart.
Finally, Pestilence looks up at me. “Are you ready to be civilized?”
“Uuuuh oooo!”
“No? Hmmm, maybe I’ll give you a little longer.”
Pride is a lonely soldier, seeing out his watch when there’s no one else there to care. I thought fire training had burned most of it out of me, but nope.
In the end, I cool myself down. Getting angry at one of the horsemen of the apocalypse for bringing about the end of man is like getting angry at ice for being cold.
I lay down on my side, ignoring the shooting pain as my weight settles on one of my bound hands.
Wordlessly, Pestilence gets up and loosens my bindings, first removing my gag, and then, when I don’t immediately curse him out, removing the linens that bind my wrists.
He sits back down, staring at the fire. I look from him, to it, and then I turn my back on both, curling up on the mattress and drawing one of the musty blankets over me.
It’s still early evening, but I’m over the day. Over Pestilence and his macabre task. Over grief and anger and all those other emotions that hang heavy inside of me.
I can feel Pestilence’s gaze on my back just as surely as if he placed a physical hand against it, but I don’t acknowledge it. I close my eyes and will myself to sleep.
My body is more tired than I assume because within minutes, I’m out.
Chapter 19
Vancouver 18 km.
I stare at the sign in growing horror.
Up until now, I’ve only ever seen the horseman pass through settlements and small towns. But Vancouver is another beast altogether.
Hundreds of thousands of people live there. Surely they’ve already posted evacuation notices. Surely the city is empty enough …