Pestilence (The Four Horsemen #1)(31)

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.