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I feel like a murderer.

Should’ve packed myself a beer—or five. This is not something to watch sober.

But I do. I watch his skin bubble and blacken and burn off. I watch him die slowly, each second so obviously agonizing. I stay rooted there for hours, sitting along this abandoned road that no one travels anymore. That entire time, my only witnesses are the trees that stand like sentinels around us.

Snow gathers along his body, melting against his smoldering remains.

At some point, I look up from him, only to notice that his horse is gone, a trail of blood and trampled snow leading off into the woods. Rationally, I know I should retrieve my shotgun and follow the horse’s trail until I find the beast, and then I should kill it.

Rationally, I know it—but that doesn’t mean I do any such thing.

Enough death for one day. Tomorrow I will finish the job.

The sky darkens. And still I sit, until the cold has seeped its way into my bones.

Eventually the elements force me to my tent. I unfold my stiff limbs, my entire body sore and sick. I don’t know if the creature’s plague has taken hold of me yet, or if this is simply what it feels like to neglect eating and drinking and finding shelter and warmth all day. Either way, I feel terribly sick. Terminally sick.

I collapse onto my sleeping bag, not bothering to pull it around me.

For better or worse, I did it.

Pestilence is dead.

Chapter 4

I wake tothe feel of a hand at my throat.

“Of all the vile humans who’ve crossed my path, you just might be the worst.”

My eyes snap open.

A monster looms over me, his face pockmarked with bloody holes, his skin charred and twisted and missing in places.

I wouldn’t recognize him except for the eyes.

Angelic blue eyes. The shit they’re always painting on ceilings of churches.

This is my horseman.

Alive from the grave.

“Impossible,” I say, my voice hushed.

He smells like ash and burnt flesh.

How could he have survived that?

He squeezes my neck tighter. “You foolish human. In all the time I’ve existed, had you really never thought another hadn’t already attempted what you failed at?

“They tried to shoot me in Toronto, gut me in Winnipeg, bleed me out in Buffalo, and strangle me in Montreal. They tried to do all that and more in so many other towns with names I doubt you’d recognize because you fickle humans never bother to look beyond yourselves.”

Someone else has already … tried?

Tried and failed.

It’s like taking a glass of ice water to the face. Of course someone else has tried to end him. I should’ve known better. But I hadn’t seen footage of it, hadn’t heard any reports of the attempts. Whoever had tried to take him out hadn’t managed to alert the public thathe can’t be killed.

“Everywhere I go,” he continues, “there’s someone like you. Someone who thinks they can kill me to save their malignant world.”