I can’t breathe.

At this very moment, the entire West Coast of North America is a wasteland.

In my mind’s eye, I see all those dead bodies lying in the hospital’s hallway. I try to imagine a city’s worth, two cities’ worth—hell, entire states’ worth—but I can’t. The scale of that devastation is unimaginable. My mind won’t let me comprehend that sort of loss.

Amongst all those millions are mothers, daughters, sons, brothers, friends, lovers, grandparents, children, babies. People that mean something to one another, innocent, kind people. People deserving of life. Right now, they’re all dying.

Pestilence couldn’t have done this. Pestilence, who questions the morality of his actions. Pestilence, who loves me.

He couldn’t have.

The two of us stare each other down. I expect to see something defensive in Pestilence’s eyes—he always had to explain himself in the past—but there’s nothing there. No guilt, no defensiveness, no stubborn tenacity.

His cool gaze is steady.

Because he did do this. More than that, he planned this. All the signs have been there. His dark moods, the ice in his blue eyes, the half-remembered apology he murmured to me yesterday when he left my side.

“How?” The scale of the devastation is so much larger than ever before. Before, Pestilence had to pass through a town to infect it. Now his reach seems to be boundless, stretching thousands of kilometers away from us.

He must understand what I’m asking because he says, “I’ve always had this reach. I just never felt the urge to exert it before.”

Not until me. Somehow, I’m the spark that ignited this terrible deed.

“Undo it,” I whisper.

“It’s done,” he says, his expression uncompromising.

I’m shaking my head. It can’t be done. I refuse to believe that.

“You cured me of infection, you can undo this,” I insist, my voice cracking.

I can’t be the only one left alive along the West Coast. That’s its own kind of hell.

“But I won’t.”

But I won’t.

“Please.”

He flinches at that word. Please. It started out as a curse spoken between us, a plea voiced only so that it could be denied. But somewhere along the way, please became redemptive.

Only now, Pestilence doesn’t want to be redeemed.

Damnit, I can still feel a part of him between my thighs. I’m sore from all the places his body scoured mine today and yesterday, his lovemaking as intense as it was passionate. He can’t have left my side all those times only to curse a good portion of North America.

“Please, Pestilence. Please … love.”

Names mean so much. A rose may smell the same no matter what name you give it, but how you think of it might change. And I think of Pestilence differently—I have for a while. But to call him by a name of my own choosing, to give him an endearment and show him that he’s more than his namesake, I haven’t been brave enough to do so until now.

But there’s nothing left to fear anymore. Not in the face of this situation.

The horseman stills. I see that coldness crack in his eyes.

“You didn’t expect that, did you?” I say. “Me loving you.” I know I hadn’t. And I don’t know in what quiet hour the realization snuck up on me, but it did. “Maybe I’m a fool and a traitor, but I’m yours,” I’m blinking back tears, “but damnit, you can’t do this.”

He takes a step towards me, then another, his eyes dying a little bit, like he wants to touch me, but knows I won’t let him. Not now, with all this blood on his hands.

Never bothered you before, Burns.

But that was back when I thought I could change him—stop him.

Should’ve known better.

“I could’ve lived with what those men did to me, cruel as it was,” Pestilence says.

My mind flashes to the horseman tied to the phone pole, most of his face gone.

“But when they shot you—” His voice cuts off with emotion, and I realize my fatal error. “You should’ve never shown me love, dear Sara,” he says.

This whole time, I’d assumed that love would redeem the horseman and save us all. I should’ve known it would only ever damn us to our grisly fates.

“If you now understand loss,” I say, “then you know what you’re taking from these people.”

His jaw clenches. “It is no more than they deserve.”

“No more than they deserve?” I say, aghast. “Who are you talking about? Rob? Ruth? Me?”

Pestilence’s mouth thins. “You seem to think that arguing about this will change these people’s fate.”

“You and change.” I shake my head bitterly. “I don’t know why you think you’re incapable of it.”

“People change, Sara, but horsemen don’t. It doesn’t matter what you think of me; I am and will always be Pestilence the Conqueror.”

He’s not going to bend. I can see it now. I should’ve seen it before, back when I could’ve protected my heart a little better.

“What happens now?” I ask. Immediately I regret the question, my stomach roiling with dread.

“The world ends.”

“And me?” I say, the desolation already creeping in.

“You will stay with me.”

He doesn’t ask it; he doesn’t even say it as a challenge. It’s spoken with complete authority.

I nod slowly.

Pestilence must sense something is wrong because he takes another step towards me.

“Don’t,” I say.

If he tries to make either of us feel better—I swear it will break the last of me.

And there’s so little left to break.

I glance around.

Can’t be in the same room as him. I’m suffocating on all this tragedy.

I turn on my heel, eager to get away from him.

“Sara,” he calls out before I can escape. His voice is so goddamn patient.

I pause. “You once told me that names don’t matter,” I say, my back to him, “that what I called you doesn’t matter.”

I glance at Pestilence over my shoulder.

Love. I think we can both hear my earlier endearment in the air between us.

His expression is wary when he inclines his head. “I remember.”

“You’re wrong, you know,” I say. “They do matter.”

Pestilence is the very worst of his nature. I glimpsed the very best of his, but that part of him, that future, is no more than a whisper of a possibility, like smoke dissipating into the wind.

I leave him at that.