Rob goes first. It’s a cold, bleak morning, the day he dies.

Ruth’s weak cry wakes me up. Though the sound of it is faint, there’s something to it that hits me low in the gut, and I just know he’s gone. The great love of her life is gone.

I hurry to her bedroom, even though there’s no reason to rush at this point. Pestilence is already there, Rob’s frail and pockmarked form cradled in his arms.

The horseman’s sorrowful eyes meet mine, and he looks so hopelessly adrift. I can’t make sense of his emotion, this horseman who insisted they must die.

Moving past him, I kneel at Ruth’s side. Even in the middle of her fever, she cries weakly. I pull up a chair to her bedside, and I stay with her, clutching her hand in mine as her grief works its way through her system.

You’d think that after a lifetime together, Ruth would be inconsolable, but not an hour after I entered her room, her sadness has passed like a storm moving through a city.

“I’ll be with him soon enough,” she tells me. “It really is a blessing, to leave this world together. And to live in an age when I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I’ll see him again—and so soon. I can almost pretend he simply left the house on an errand.”

Only, Rob’s not coming back.

Her eyes grow distant and sad. “I just can’t believe it’s over …”

Just then, Pestilence re-enters the room, his presence like that of the Grim Reaper. But maybe that’s just me because when Ruth sees him, she has a smile ready for the horseman.

Instead of returning the look, Pestilence glances my way, his brow wrinkling with concern as he frowns. He stops well away from the bed.

“Don’t be a stranger now,” Ruth chastises him. “Come closer.”

The horseman moves towards Ruth like she’s a cobra set to strike. It’s almost laughable to see formidable Pestilence wary of soft, loving Ruth.

She pats the bed next to her. I wince at even that small action. I know how unbelievably painful the sores make movement.

Gently, Pestilence sits where she indicates.

The old woman reaches out to him and cups his cheek. “I forgive you, dear.”

Pestilence looks blindsided. “For what?”

But he knows. I can see it on his face. He knows exactly what she’s forgiving him for, and he’s covering up the fact that he—is—shook.

“You don’t have an easy task ahead of you,” she says. “For whatever reason, the Lord deemed fit for you to feel what it is to be human—the loss, the heartbreak, all of it.”

Suddenly, Pestilence appears very young.

Only now do I see in him what Ruth does: he is one of us even as he stands apart. He’s not insulated to our pain and torment the way I’d like to believe he is. He has to bear it like some kind of penance.

With that one realization, the entire axis of my world shifts.

He is every bit a victim of this apocalypse as I am.

Noble, gallant Pestilence, who must watch us all die, who must make us all die, even though death greatly bothers him. No wonder he hates us so much. He has to. Otherwise, he’s murdering thousands and thousands of people for no good reason other than the fact that he was told to do so.

“You’re going to be okay. You walk in His light,” Ruth says like the straight baller she is. I mean, holy shit, this woman is on her deathbed and she’s comforting the dude that put her there. If that’s not savage, I don’t know what is.

Pestilence’s nostrils flare, as though he’s holding back some strong emotion.

“Rob’s not here to say it,” Ruth continues, “so I will say it for him: You take care of that little lady you’re with, alright?”

He stares at her the same way he did that first night, like he’s never encountered a Ruth before.

Slowly, he nods. “With my life, I swear it.”

Something warm and uncomfortable spreads through me.

She gives him another one of her sweet smiles. “Now, if you would be a dear, I’m awfully thirsty.”

She has to no more than utter the request for Pestilence to do her bidding. The two of us watch him leave, and it’s only after he closes the door behind him that Ruth calls out to me.

“Come closer, Sara.”

I almost don’t. Now that it’s my turn to sit on the bed and hear Ruth’s final words I find I really don’t want to. A childish part of me believes that if I avoid doing so, she might live longer, like this ailment is a spell that can be broken.

Reluctantly, I sit down on the mattress and take her hand in mine.

She peers at me closely. “My, are you young.”

Now that we’re alone, she seems fainter, weaker. No matter how many deaths I sit through, I always forget how alarmingly fast the end comes to the plague’s victims.

“Only on the outside,” I say. It feels as though I’ve lived a hundred different lives, each one of them violent and bloody. I guess that’s what sorrow does to you—it fast tracks your soul.

Ruth gives a sad chuckle. “If that isn’t the truth …” Her eyes wander off before returning to me. She squeezes my hand, her grip surprisingly strong. “What you’re doing … ” she begins.

Immediately, my pulse begins to hammer away. I have a horrible feeling I know where she’s going with this.

“It’s … good,” she finishes.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Just like Pestilence, I’m hiding from the truth in Ruth’s words. And just like Pestilence, I’m shaken by how perceptive she is.

Ruth gives me a sly look. “But I think you do.”

I squirm under her gaze.

“I’ve been around long enough to see the signs,” she continues.

The signs of what?

“It’s alright to care about him—even to love him,” Ruth says.

“I don’t love him,” I say too fervently. My words ring false even to my own ears, and I don’t know why. I am not in love with him.

She pats my hand. “Well, in the case that you eventually do, you should know it’s not wrong, and it’s definitely not something to feel guilty about.”

But isn’t it? To love the thing that’s destroying your world? That seems tasteless at best, unforgiveable at worst.

“Love is the greatest gift we can give or receive,” Ruth continues, unaware of my turbulent thoughts, “and I have a feeling,” she says quietly, “love is the only thing that can get us out of this mess.” Her eyes squint. “Do you understand me?”

Of course I understand her. It’s the slogan every religious busybody has been bleating from the top of their lungs since the Arrival. Except when Ruth says it, a woman who doesn’t just utter the sentiment but has lived it, I finally take the words somewhat seriously.

She nods to the door. “That boy out there”—only Ruth would have the wherewithal to call ageless Pestilence a boy—“has seen a lot of human nature, the bulk of it ugly. He’s only now seeing the beauty of it, and largely through you.”

She gives my hand another squeeze. “Show him what we shine with. Show him humanity is worthy of redemption.”