I nestle closer to him as I let myself drift off.
One of his fingers traces over my stomach.
His body slides away from mine, and his voice filters in from the edge of sleep. “I’m sorry, Sara. I was waiting for this, and I thought that maybe … maybe you getting better would change my mind, but it hasn’t. It’s only made me surer of what I need to do.”
I grope for his hand, but it’s gone.
Chapter 49
The next morning, I make my way into the kitchen, trying not to let Pestilence see just how fatigued that simple action makes me.
I shouldn’t have bothered. For once the horseman isn’t even paying attention. The television in the living room is on, and Pestilence is standing in front of it, his arms folded, staring at the screen grimly.
I glance at the T.V., just to see what has tied up his attention.
“… Breaking news: virulent outbreak of Messianic Fever along the West Coast and Pacific Northwest, spreading into Mexico. State and local governments are rapidly trying to quarantine infected areas. No known sighting of the horseman yet. Please stay in your homes and avoid city centers. I repeat, please stay in your homes and avoid city centers. To all those affected: our prayers and thoughts are with you.”
My stomach bottoms out.
I stand there for a long time, not talking, not reacting, just … staring at the television dumbly. The report replays itself five different ways, the information regurgitated to fill the empty minutes. They are showing the pictures of Central Park taken after Pestilence passed through the city months ago, with its mass graves filled with bodies. Then images from Toronto and Montreal appear, the few photos anyone has of the Fever. There are even a couple from Vancouver and Seattle, places I saw with my own two eyes.
But now new footage joins the old. A shaky video of a hospital in San Francisco appears, the place filled with the dying. Another from Los Angeles, where people are lying in the streets, their eyes sunken and their faces flushed with the beginnings of fever.
San Francisco, Los Angeles. Those places are states away.
I grow cold.
I manage to rip my eyes away from the screen, and now, now Pestilence is looking at me. There’s still that damn apology in his eyes, but no remorse. None. In its place is a familiar coldness.
My throat works. I don’t want to ask because asking makes it real, and this can’t be real. The words come anyway.
“What did you do?” I whisper.
“My purpose.”
Chapter 50
I can’t breathe.
At this very moment, the entire West Coast of North America is a wasteland.
In my mind’s eye, I see all those dead bodies lying in the hospital’s hallway. I try to imagine a city’s worth, two cities’ worth—hell, entire states’ worth—but I can’t. The scale of that devastation is unimaginable. My mind won’t let me comprehend that sort of loss.
Amongst all those millions are mothers, daughters, sons, brothers, friends, lovers, grandparents, children, babies. People that mean something to one another, innocent, kind people. People deserving of life. Right now, they’re all dying.
Pestilence couldn’t have done this. Pestilence, who questions the morality of his actions. Pestilence, who loves me.
He couldn’t have.
The two of us stare each other down. I expect to see something defensive in Pestilence’s eyes—he always had to explain himself in the past—but there’s nothing there. No guilt, no defensiveness, no stubborn tenacity.
His cool gaze is steady.
Because he did do this. More than that, he planned this. All the signs have been there. His dark moods, the ice in his blue eyes, the half-remembered apology he murmured to me yesterday when he left my side.
“How?” The scale of the devastation is so much larger than ever before. Before, Pestilence had to pass through a town to infect it. Now his reach seems to be boundless, stretching thousands of kilometers away from us.
He must understand what I’m asking because he says, “I’ve always had this reach. I just never felt the urge to exert it before.”
Not until me. Somehow, I’m the spark that ignited this terrible deed.
“Undo it,” I whisper.
“It’s done,” he says, his expression uncompromising.
I’m shaking my head. It can’t be done. I refuse to believe that.
“You cured me of infection, you can undo this,” I insist, my voice cracking.
I can’t be the only one left alive along the West Coast. That’s its own kind of hell.
“But I won’t.”
But I won’t.
“Please.”
He flinches at that word. Please. It started out as a curse spoken between us, a plea voiced only so that it could be denied. But somewhere along the way, please became redemptive.
Only now, Pestilence doesn’t want to be redeemed.
Damnit, I can still feel a part of him between my thighs. I’m sore from all the places his body scoured mine today and yesterday, his lovemaking as intense as it was passionate. He can’t have left my side all those times only to curse a good portion of North America.
“Please, Pestilence. Please … love.”
Names mean so much. A rose may smell the same no matter what name you give it, but how you think of it might change. And I think of Pestilence differently—I have for a while. But to call him by a name of my own choosing, to give him an endearment and show him that he’s more than his namesake, I haven’t been brave enough to do so until now.
But there’s nothing left to fear anymore. Not in the face of this situation.
The horseman stills. I see that coldness crack in his eyes.
“You didn’t expect that, did you?” I say. “Me loving you.” I know I hadn’t. And I don’t know in what quiet hour the realization snuck up on me, but it did. “Maybe I’m a fool and a traitor, but I’m yours,” I’m blinking back tears, “but damnit, you can’t do this.”
He takes a step towards me, then another, his eyes dying a little bit, like he wants to touch me, but knows I won’t let him. Not now, with all this blood on his hands.
Never bothered you before, Burns.
But that was back when I thought I could change him—stop him.
Should’ve known better.
“I could’ve lived with what those men did to me, cruel as it was,” Pestilence says.
My mind flashes to the horseman tied to the phone pole, most of his face gone.
“But when they shot you—” His voice cuts off with emotion, and I realize my fatal error. “You should’ve never shown me love, dear Sara,” he says.
This whole time, I’d assumed that love would redeem the horseman and save us all. I should’ve known it would only ever damn us to our grisly fates.
“If you now understand loss,” I say, “then you know what you’re taking from these people.”
His jaw clenches. “It is no more than they deserve.”
“No more than they deserve?” I say, aghast. “Who are you talking about? Rob? Ruth? Me?”
Pestilence’s mouth thins. “You seem to think that arguing about this will change these people’s fate.”
“You and change.” I shake my head bitterly. “I don’t know why you think you’re incapable of it.”