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 died last, 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.

I brush a few stray tears from my cheeks. Placing Stacy’s hand on her chest, I rise, heading to where he stands in the doorway.

I step so close to him I can feel his body heat.

“Why do you have to take the children?” I whisper hoarsely.

His hand falls to my shoulder, steering me out of the room. “You’d prefer a slow death for them, is that it?”

“I’d prefer for them not to die at all.”

“What do you think will happen, human, once their families die off? Once these kids are all alone? Think they can hunt for themselves? Forage for themselves?”

All my retorts are like rocks in my mouth, rolling over one another. In the end, I just glare at him.

“See,” he says, “you yourself know my words to be true, even if you despise them.”

“Why do you have to kill at all?” I say as he leads me down the hall.

“Why did you have to ruin the world?” the horseman retorts.

“I didn’t.”

“You did. Just as I don’t have to touch each man to kill him, nor do you have to personally light the world on fire to be the reason it burns.”

I rub my eyes. Every time we talk, I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall, hurting myself and getting nowhere for all my effort.

“Why does it have to be so God-awful?” I whisper. “The lumps, the sores …”

“It’s plague. It’s not supposed to be enjoyable.”

He leads me outside where Trixie waits, the saddle bags laden with goods lifted from this house. Seeing all the odds and ends tucked away, I feel like a grave robber, looting from the dead. I know they no longer need food and jackets, but I still can’t shake the wrongness of it all.

Woodenly, I get on the horse, Pestilence joining me a moment later. And just like that, the two of us leave the house and its tragic former occupants behind.

We’ve barely gone a kilometer when the horseman fishes a wrapped sandwich from one of the saddlebags and hands it to me. “You haven’t eaten,” he explains.

I turn the item over and over in my hand. “Did you … make this for me?”

“I like the taste of jam. I thought you might as well.”

So, yes, he did make it for me. The same man that just delivered death made me a sandwich because he noticed I hadn’t eaten.

I pinch my eyes shut and draw in a long breath. Why does this have to be so complicated? Why can’t he just stay in the nice little box in my mind labeled “Evil” and that be that? These brief flashes where he’s considerate and tender, they’re slowly breaking me.

Opening my eyes, I peel away the sandwich’s packaging, and sure enough, between the two coarse loaves of homemade bread is a generous helping of jam. And only jam.

It’s not lost on me how very similar this is to a pie—two bready surfaces holding a sugary fruit filling. I bring it to my mouth and bite into it.

It’s not bad. I don’t know why I thought it would be. Maybe I assumed jam sandwiches ought to taste wrong. Maybe I thought that after the day I’ve had, anything would taste like dirt in my mouth.

Instead it tastes like an indulgence. As I eat it, I imagine Pestilence in that cluttered little kitchen we just left, making this for me right next to the refrigerator-turned-icebox that was scattered with stick-figure artwork and alphabet magnets. All while, down the hall, I watched a little girl draw her last.

The sugary-sweet taste of the sandwich sours in my mouth. I take a few deep breaths before I try another bite.

“I don’t like watching them die,” Pestilence admits behind me.

I lower the sandwich.

He’d been all but absent during those four days I stayed with the family. I thought perhaps there was some other reason for it.

“Why didn’t you force us to keep moving?” This could’ve been avoided if he didn’t linger in one place for any length of time.

“You needed the rest,” he replies.

Absently, I touch one of the bandages covering my wrists.

He’s only keeping me alive to punish me, I’d told Helen.

I don’t think so, she’d said. He might have his reasons, but I don’t think punishment is one of them.

I keep my thoughts to myself.

“But you still infect them,” I say.

“I still infect them,” he agrees. “And I will continue to infect them until my time has passed. But I do not like watching them die.”

The two of us ride for the rest of the day, passing through a series of small, deserted settlements. My thighs have finally stopped being so saddle sore, and my back itches where my skin is healing.

The weather has also decided to give me a break, the weak winter sun shining brilliantly above us. It’s still colder than a witch’s tit, but hey, it’s not raining. I’ll take it.

The trees hedge the highway to our left, and to our right, the beautiful waters of the Howe Sound glitter. Speckled amongst them are a series of islands, and beyond those is the other edge of the mainland. The sight would take your breath away if not for the rows and rows of rusted cars sitting between me and the view.

The dead automobiles lay abandoned on either side of the road. This must be one of the sites still waiting on the government-funded clean up. The Arrival that knocked out the majority of our power also stranded thousands upon thousands of people in their cars in the middle of open road.

If I close my eyes, I can still see some of the gruesome images of the pileups, cars smashed to smithereens with their occupants still inside. We no longer talk about that first wave of fatalities, not since Pestilence reappeared, but so many, many people died that first day—from car crashes, from planes falling out of the sky, from life-supporting machines giving out, and so many strange scenarios no one ever saw coming.