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“No.”

My jaw clenches as I stare at him, my eyes accusing. He meets my gaze unflinchingly.

“I am not here to please your every whim.” Pestilence’s voice is steady, unfeeling. “I am here to end the world.”

Chapter 18

It takes threedays for plague to kill a man. Four, if you’re particularly unlucky.

This family is particularly unlucky.

I don’t know if this is simply nature at work, or if Pestilence is pulling the strings (either to punish me for pissing him off, or to “compromise” with me and give this family a bit longer to live).

It takes four long, agonizing days of sickness before the entire family passes. Mother, father, son and daughter. All of them taken by this stupid, senseless plague.

Four days I lingered in that house at Pestilence’s insistence while I recovered, four days the horseman made himself scarce, four days that I cared for the family—against their wishes. They wished me gone. At least, they did until they were too weak to take care of themselves.

“Why is he doing this?” the woman, Helen, asked me the day before she died.

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 diedlast, 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.