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“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Your feeble body needs amenities.”

I stare at the hospital with quickly rising horror.Amenities like gauze.

We’d run out of the linen wrappings this morning.

“I don’t need any more bandages,” I rush to say.

“Yes, you do.” Gentler, Pestilence says. “Do you really think it takes me going to the hospital for them all to die? Come now, Sara, I merely need to walk through a city to see its doom.”

I glance back at him. I know I should be processing his words, but I’m hung up on the fact that he actually said my name.

He continues on, dauntless. “Whether or not I enter a hospital, matters not. The humans will still fall, there especially.”

It’s not like what he’s saying is news to me, it’s just that I don’t want to see the faces of those too sick and feeble to flee, as death incarnate walks amongst them.

There’s a chance the town went to special lengths to remove the hospital’s patients. It’s possible. But it’s also possible that the weakest individuals were simply unable to evacuate.

I grab the horseman’s forearm as a thought comes over me. “A general store,” I say, like I’ve discovered the cure for cancer. “They will have bandages at a general store.”

Pestilence stares down at where I grip his arm. “Did you see a general store on our way here?”

“I saw at least three of them.” These days there’s a trading post or general store on every street corner, each one existing because they have some edge on the market.

The horseman squints at me. “And you think I should go there instead?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then it is settled,” he says with finality.

Was … was convincing him really that easy?

For an instant I almost believe it. But then Trixie Skillz keeps clomping forward, and the hospital looms ever closer.

“What about the general store?” I look over my shoulder at Pestilence.

His face is grim as it meets mine. “I mean to make you suffer.”

Chapter 15

Hospitals are alwaysthe first places to go. That’s the one thing all those movies got right. As soon as people began to get sick, they swarmed the medical facilities, thinking that surely modern medicine could cure this. Surely we were better off than the poor sods who caught Black Death. All those centuries we spent studying illnesses and conquering them—surely we were equipped by now to stop an epidemic.

We were wrong.

Pestilence hops off his horse, bow and quiver at his back, eyeing the building. This close to it, I can see a couple spooked faces staring out. One of them is a woman holding her rosary, her lips moving in prayer.

God’s not going to save you, I want to tell her.He’s the one who wants you dead.

Swiveling back to me, the horseman reaches for my waist. “Come, Sara, and gaze upon the faces of the soon-to-be departed.”

“I hate you,” I say as he lifts me off his steed.

“Ah, hate. Another distinctly human emotion.” He sets me down.

I don’t think it’s a distinctly human emotion—the horseman seems to have plenty of it himself.

He strides ahead of me to the double doors, looking like a gallant knight in his armor. For once in his retched life, he tries to open the doors the proper way. They don’t budge.