Can’t stay here though.
I head back to the door, and again he picks me up and bodily moves me away.
Again, as soon as he sets me down I move towards the door.
He cuts me off. “Sara, I cannot let you leave.”
He’s begging me with his eyes, and I know he sees what I feel: I’m not strong enough, healed enough. All those weeks of traveling, all those wounds, even with the rest, my body isn’t ready for more. And still I drive it forward.
“Pestilence, don’t make this worse than it already is,” I practically plead. “I’m leaving, either with your blessing or against your will, but I won’t stay here any longer.”
The look on his face pulverizes the last of me. I can see his heart breaking in front of me. That raw grief lingers for just a moment, and then his features harden.
Without a word, he picks me up again.
“What are you doing?” I struggle in his arms. “Pestilence, put me down!”
Ignoring my demands, he moves me into the master bedroom and deposits me onto the bed.
By the time I scramble off of it—taking an extra few seconds to let the vertigo pass—he’s already made it to the door. With a parting look, he slips out, closing it behind him.
Rushing after him, I grab the doorknob. I twist it, but the door won’t open. The horseman must be holding it closed.
“Pestilence, let me go.” My voice rises with panic.
He doesn’t seriously mean to keep me here, does he?
“You will forgive me,” he says quietly from the other side of the door.
“Let me go!” I shout louder.
But he doesn’t.
Pestilence boards up the master bedroom windows and blockades all the doors leading out. Not before I rush outside a few times and he has to drag me back in, but eventually, he manages to bar all the exits, leaving me trapped inside.
And so I’m back to being his prisoner.
At least the horseman is smart enough to keep his distance. I only see him a few times throughout the rest of the day, when he drops off food and water, his eyes sad and haunted.
I think maybe whatever madness came over Pestilence will wear off. That he’ll eventually unbar the windows and open the door and beg for my forgiveness.
But it never happens. One day melts into the next, and he stays away, coming to me only so that he can feed me. Not even at night does he slip into my room to express his tortured feelings for me, or to fall asleep pressed against my back.
My body misses him, my heart misses him. The latter is dying away beneath my ribcage, hating his betrayals yet wanting him still.
I don’t try to escape. What’s the use? I can’t slip past Pestilence unnoticed.
I try not to think about all the millions of dead people that must be rotting right where they died. The T.V. stays off for that very reason. I can’t bear to watch the news and see all those bodies. Not when I played a role (albeit, unwittingly) in their deaths.
That leaves me to pilfer through the few books in the room or to recite poetry from memory.
Sometimes I can physically feel Pestilence’s presence nearby—listening to the sound of my voice, lingering outside my door. The air feels saturated with all the things left unspoken and unfinished between us. Things that have been left to decay alongside all those dead bodies.
Life goes on like this for days, and then a whole week.
Is this truly going to become our new normal? Pestilence keeping me like a caged bird, fated neither to die nor to fully live?
When the door opens on day eight, Pestilence looks beaten down. His blue eyes are dim, and his golden-blond hair doesn’t have its usual luster.
“I cannot do this anymore,” he admits. “I surrender.”
I freeze where I sit on the bed.
Pestilence the Conqueror, surrendering?
He removes his crown from his head and tosses it on the floor between us. “It’s yours,” he says bitterly. “I may have laid claim to the world, but I’ve lost you, the only thing I ever really wanted.”
My pulse gallops as I stare first at the discarded crown, then up at the man who wore it.
“You are free to leave,” he says. “I will not stop you.”
His eyes are bleak. Gone are the shadows in his eyes, but so is whatever spark of hope once laid in them. When they touch mine, he looks at me like he’s drowning.
I should feel exalted, vindicated in some small way, but it’s just one more pain to add to the rest.
For several seconds I don’t move.
“Damnit, Sara, if you want your freedom, leave before I come to my senses.”
I slide off the bed, grabbing my things one by one, keeping a wary eye on him. I half expect him to slam the door shut in my face at any moment. This must be some trick.
But it doesn’t appear to be.
I step past the threshold to the room, pausing to face him.
“Go, and join your doomed race,” he says, his gaze reluctantly meeting mine. How it now blisters! He has pain to match my own. “But don’t expect me to kill you.”
Too late, it seems, he’s figured out the meaning of mercy.
After everything Pestilence has done, I don’t expect my leaving to hurt me so bad. I thought my heart had been abused enough to forget that it belongs to the horseman.
I was wrong.
I don’t look at Pestilence when I leave him at the house’s entrance. Walking away from him pains me enough. Seeing whatever emotion fills his face might make me waver. The horseman no longer wears his crown. It still lays, forgotten, in the bedroom.
I head for the street, each step cutting me deeper and deeper. I’ve lost everything else—family, friends, neighbors. Leaving Pestilence is going to bleed out the last parts of me.
Where should I go? How many kilometers will I have to walk to get to the living? Will I die before then? I know Pestilence won’t allow me to succumb to plague, but there are other ways to die. I could starve, I could perish from the elements.
And if I don’t die, what then?
One step at a time, Burns.
It’s only once I reach the road that I turn back around. The mansion we’ve been staying in perches on a small rise. Standing like a sentinel at its threshold is the horseman.
Pestilence watches me, his face solemn. For a moment, I think I see hope spark in his eyes.
He thinks I’m changing my mind.
Steeling myself, I face the street once more and walk away.
Chapter 52
I don’t hear the news. Not for weeks and weeks.
Still, I should’ve known. The truth was so obviously in front of me.
Instead it takes an outpost owner near the Canadian border to convince me beyond a shadow of a doubt.
“That blighted horseman’s gone. I swear it on the newly dead, he is,” the man says, leaning on the pine countertop as he adds up my things.
The sight of the man himself, alive and bustling about his store, is surprising enough, but then again, I’ve ran into others on my way back up the coast. I assumed their presence had to do with Pestilence spreading his plague solely southward.
Now I stare at the store owner, his news not computing.
The world thought Pestilence was gone when we were holed up inside that mansion, but once I left, I assumed that he’d resume his travels.
“You mean there haven’t been any new sightings of him?” I ask dumbly.
He shakes his head.
No new sightings of him. An unpleasant sensation twists my gut, but I can’t say what causes it.
Maybe there’s no longer anyone left alive to spot him. The territory from Washington to California is vast … vast and full of the dead.
“Have you not heard?” the owner asks when he notices my surprise.
“Last news I received was that Oregon, California, and parts of Mexico were infected,” I say. Even now a chill slides through me at the thought. I played a role in that.
The man lets out a wheezy laugh, pulling a slim case from beneath his counter. Opening it, he takes the raw ingredients from inside and begins to hand roll a cigarette. “Oh, you’ve missed so much.”