Around me, the rusted cars sit as sad reminders of the day the world changed. Pestilence doesn’t spare them a glance. He and Trixie only have eyes for the horizon.

We ride throughout the day, not even stopping to eat. I come to find that’s because Pestilence made me not one but three jam sandwiches and packed me a jar of artichoke hearts and a can of anchovies. I don’t have it in me to tell him that he’s not going to want to sit anywhere near me if I actually crack that can of fish open.

Then again, I could get him to try the fish … we’d see just how well he enjoyed human food then.

It’s not until the sky is a deep blue that we turn off the highway. Pestilence passes several houses, some darkened and others with oil lamps burning bright inside, before we finally head up the driveway of some unlucky soul’s home.

The screen door bangs open and closed with the wind, making an eerie, squealing noise. And now that I’m looking for it, I notice that the windows are boarded up. It’s clear that whoever lived here, they haven’t for a long time.

Sights like this aren’t uncommon. Maybe the well on the property dried up or the pump stopped working, maybe the house was too far from civilization now that cars were obsolete. Maybe a relative took the previous owners in, or maybe they died and no one wanted to buy this house in the middle of nowhere. The stories behind homes like this one are all different, but they all lead to the same fate—abandonment.

I hear there are entire ghost towns where people once lived but do no longer. Las Vegas, Dubai, …

The thought of all those once opulent cities sitting like bones in the desert, their glittery attractions dulled with dust and falling into disrepair, sends a shiver down my spine.

Death hath reared himself a throne, in a strange city, lying alone … Poe’s words ring out in my mind.

My attention returns to the home in front of us. I don’t like watching them die, Pestilence had said. A part of me thinks that maybe that’s why he chose this place.

The horseman tends to Trixie while I enter the home. As soon as I step inside, I pat the darkened wall until I find a light switch. Once I find it, I flick it on, ever hopeful that this house will have electricity.

For one blinding moment the entryway flares bright with light. Then, with a shattering pop, the light disappears just as suddenly as it came.

“Shit.”

I guess I should be thankful the damage isn’t worse. I’ve had to put out more electrical fires than wildfires over the last few years. All these creature comforts are on the fritz.

Pestilence comes in behind me, already unfastening his heavy armor. He drops his bow and quiver on a nearby side table, then each piece of his armor. Lastly, he sets his crown down, running a hand through his hair.

It’s all so very human. I wonder if he knows that.

“Light?” he asks.

“It doesn’t work.” I head over to another switch and flip it on and off. Nothing happens. “Nope, definitely doesn’t.”

I begin to grope around the living room, looking for candles, lamps, wicks, matches—anything that can illuminate this place now that the sun’s gone down. Pestilence heads back outside, leaving me to fumble alone.

He comes in a few minutes later, carrying several items. He passes me, setting his haul in what looks to be the kitchen.

I hear the hiss of a match being struck, and a moment later, he lights a lantern he must’ve picked up at one of the last houses we stayed in.

He hands the lantern to me, then walks down the home’s darkened hallway. I watch him go, listening as he opens and shuts another door. The muffled sound of a garage door being manually lifted drifts in, then the steady sound of hooves clicking against cement as he leads Trixie out of the elements.

I lift the lantern, looking around at the house. Half of the furniture is covered with ratty sheets, and what isn’t covered is blanketed in a thick coat of dust.

I walk over to the fireplace. There are still pictures sitting on the mantle. I pick up one, using my thumb to rub away a coat of dust. Beneath it is a portrait of a woman in her early twenties, her hair permed, frizzed and fluffed within an inch of its life. I choose another photo at random, dusting it off enough to see a group of squinty-eyed kids in bathing suits, floaties pushed high up on their arms.

I set it down as my gooseflesh rises. There’s an entire life here that appears to abruptly have stopped. Whether death or displacement took them, it took them swiftly.

Whole cities will look like this in the future.

It won’t just be Vegas and Dubai. It will be every place Pestilence visits. And in that dystopian future, someone like me will go from house to house, skirting around the decayed corpses that have been left unburied inside.

I shudder at the thought.

The door to the garage opens and shuts, and Pestilence’s heavy footfalls make their way back to the living room. When he appears, he has several dry logs with him. He eyes me before making his way over, beginning to stack the wood in the fireplace.

An hour later, a fire is going, a half a dozen candles are flickering around the living room, and a mattress and a few moth-eaten blankets have been dragged out from one of the closets and laid out in the living room so that I can sleep where it’s warm.

I sit on the mattress, knees pulled up under my chin, sipping water out of an old earthenware mug (the well still works) and staring into the flames. Next to me, Pestilence lounges against the mattress, his legs crossed in front of him.

“Why do you help them?” he asks.

His eyes find mine, the flames dancing in them. Even lit by fire, he looks like an angel.

The devil was also an angel.

“Help who?” I ask.

“That family. And the man before them.”

Is he serious?

I study his features, my heart unwillingly picking up speed because my body is an idiot that cannot discern evil mo-fo from hot male human.

“How can I not help them?” I finally say.

“You know they’re going to die anyway,” he says.

It’s such cold, pragmatic reasoning. Like the means to an end means nothing next to the end itself.

“So?” I glance back at the flames. “If I can ease their discomfort, then I will.”

I can feel his gaze on me, hotter than the fire.

“You don’t just do it to ease their pain, though, do you?” he says. “You also do it to ease your own.”

What a clever little horseman he is.

I press my mouth together, frowning. “You’re right,” I say. “Suffering is for the living, and you have made me suffer.” Watching those children succumb, drowning in their own fluids, having to listen to their cries … “And how I despise you for it.”

“I expect nothing less from the human who burned me alive.”

I turn on him, my anger rising. “So it’s still about your suffering is it? You’ve wiped out entire cities, but at the end of the day you were hurt. You want to know something? I hunted you down like a fucking animal because you deserve it. And I would do it again and again and again.”

Would I though? A small, traitorous part of me isn’t so sure.

Undaunted by that thought, I continue. “You’re killing us all cruelly, and you hate us for it.”

He says nothing to my outburst, just sits there, studying me.