Pestilence by Laura Thalassa
Chapter 33
You can feel the end coming, like a wave rushing in. It moves over you, makes itself at home beneath your skin. It settles into your lungs and slips into your heart and eventually inserts itself into your mind. This terrible, awful thing called death goes from being a distant eventuality to a sudden certainty.
As the evening stretches on, Ruth and Rob need more and more care, and it’s somewhere during that time that I feel Death join our little party, lingering in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to collect these souls. The elderly couple must feel it too because even though they’re weak and in increasing amounts of pain, they manage to move into each other’s arms.
Pestilence stares at them curiously, as though he’s never seen anything like this before.
Their skin is old, their bones are old, their hearts are old. And they’ve loved each other for a long, long time. And yet it’s clear that even after all the years they’ve had together, this parting is too soon.
Far too soon.
My throat clogs. This is … personal. Really, really personal. And heartbreaking—and not for my eyes. I bow my head and eventually slip out of the room.
The horseman doesn’t follow after me, choosing instead to be an interloper. Five minutes pass, then ten.
What could he possibly be doing in there?
Finally, when it seems like an eternity has passed, I open the door again and peek in. Pestilence sits next to the bed, his large frame dwarfing the side chair. He watches the couple with a confounded look on his face.
Ugh, need to remember that this guy has zero social skills.
Slipping inside, I take his hand and tug him off the chair and out of the room. He appears just as confused by this new turn of events as he did about the couple he was staring creepily at.
“What is it, Sara?” he asks when I shut the door behind us.
“These are their last hours. I’m sure they want to spend them alone.”
His gaze wanders back to the closed door. “How do you know they want to be … alone?”
I can tell he finds my word choice strange—alone is traveling through a foreign land for weeks on end and never once speaking to another soul. It’s most definitely not holding onto another human being murmuring in low tones about things only lovers know.
Pestilence is staring at me, waiting for my answer.
How to put this? I never thought I’d have to explain something this obvious to someone else.
“I mean that they want to be alone together,” I say. “They want to share their final time enjoying each other’s company, not ours.”
The horseman is still looking at me with no small amount of confusion, so I elaborate. “We only get so many minutes alive,” I say. “When you find someone worth spending that time with, you don’t want to share those minutes with anyone else.” Particularly not your final few minutes.
For a long moment, Pestilence digests this. Eventually, he inclines his head. “Then I will leave them … alone.”
I peer closely at him. “Why were you watching them anyway?”
Pestilence doesn’t really like watching people die, for all the death he delivers.
He hesitates before saying, “They are in love.”
Now it’s me who isn’t following.
When Pestilence sees this, he explains, “This is the first time I’ve seen humans in love. It’s … curious, compelling, to see a side of human nature that has been previously hidden from me.”
I don’t know what to make of that. “But you’ve been alive to witness thousands of years of human history. You must’ve seen love at some point during all that time.” After all, he’s the one who’s always waxing on about how ageless he is.
“Yes,” he says slowly. “But not like this.”
Not as a living, breathing, feeling thing. And somehow thatmakes all the difference.
