by Elisa Hansen
Death’s hood turned, and Emily followed his gaze to two chrome units hanging from a clip on the black saddle. They reminded her of her grandmother’s old round, flat kitchen scales. Connected to each other by a coiled wire, their LCD displays flashed and cycled through gibberish symbols faster than Emily’s eye could follow.
War brought his horse forward, its armor chinking as he moved around Death. “Accept it, brother. When we told Time our projected tolls for the near future, he more than understood what we could accomplish—”
“You told Time?” Death took a step back.
“With you out of the way, that is,” Famine added.
“It didn’t take much convincing,” said Pestilence.
“What tolls?” Death demanded. “What did you tell Time you would do without me?”
A thin smile twitched Pestilence’s hollow cheeks. “Only he can tell what is best.”
“What does he want? Where is he headed? What is he after?”
She shook her head. “Accept it, brother.”
Death turned to the side. Emily could see his skull within the hood again, but he seemed to see nothing at all.
“We do not need you.” Famine flashed a robust smile.
“Our victims are ours to keep,” continued her sister. “You turn yours over to what is beyond if you like, but we will no longer turn ours over to you.”
“Meanwhile, we’re amassing legions,” War said. “You ought to try it.”
“How can I?” Death’s voice rang hollow. He looked at none of them. “Bound by the fabric, without my horse.”
They allowed him a moment of silence. A brief moment. Then their expressions hardened.
“He took your scythe, too,” Famine noticed.
“At least it’s not broken.” Death shot a look at her scales.
“I keep them as souvenirs.” She gave them a pat. They flashed, making an injured beeping sound as they spewed nonsense symbols.
“I will get mine back.” Death lifted his head. The pale green fire in his eyes blazed at the three of them. “This will not last for you.”
She laughed, and the black clouds above churned, rumbled in applause. Death threw up a hand as if to silence them, and they ignited. A jagged streak of lightning tore free to dagger the ground.
Emily jumped. The tumbleweeds around her jerked in the wind. One broke loose and fled.
“What’s that?” Pestilence twisted to look over. Famine stopped giggling.
Emily flattened herself into the bushes, pressed her hands over her head. She could see nothing but brambles.
Hoof steps moved near, but War’s voice sounded no closer when he spoke. “What did you honestly want for our house, brother? True apocalypse would mean the end of us all.”
A horse wheezed less than a foot from Emily.
“You have let our sisters convince you,” Death murmured. “This isn’t your battle. This is their starvation plague.”
An excited squeal from one of the women drowned any retort, and Emily found herself discovered.
“Ooh,” Pestilence cooed from the edge of the bushes. “It’s one of my children. Oh, hello, my darling. Oh, come to me.”
Famine’s giggles sounded just as close.
What were the chances of them going away if Emily just didn’t move? But something compelling in their resonant voices tugged at her. Her hands disobeyed her rationality, sliding down to push herself from the sand. Her head poked up through the bushes. The two women smiled down upon her. This close, they almost looked beautiful. And big. Not as big as Death, but they made her feel tiny.
Emily peeked at Death from the corner of her eye. He avoided her gaze.
Pestilence extended her hands to Emily. “Come to me, dear one,” she crooned. “What a pretty little one. Oh, you’re fresh, aren’t you? Come to me.”
Dreading to disobey, Emily shuffled through the bushes to the horse’s side, her eyes fixed on the white glow in the woman’s dark orbs. She stopped when her forehead brushed against the outstretched fingers. They felt weirdly nice.
They combed back her hair, stroked through it. “There you are, dearie, that’s a good child. Oh, how sweet. You are a good, good girl.”
“Um, thanks?” Emily’s voice felt even tinier than the rest of her.
The hand jerked away. “What!”
Emily gulped and looked to Death. He shook his head, his hands clenching at his sides. The three horsemen looked at him as well.
“What is this?” Pestilence took up her reins and steered around to examine Emily.
“She talked,” Famine yelped. “That’s not one of yours.”
“Yes, it is.” She leaned down to peer into Emily’s eyes.
“Um.” Emily tried to swallow.
“One of my arrows hit you. I am sure of it. Last night. You are undead, and yet not.”
“Is she un-undead?” Famine asked.
“Does a double negative make a positive?” War rode closer.
Emily shook her head and took a step back. Desperate, she looked to Death again.
He remained still for a moment, like a graveyard statue, but then his shoulders sagged. He stepped forward and gestured to her. She jumped up and ran to his side, sliding around so he stood between her and the horses.
Pestilence gasped. “Oh-ho!”
Famine giggled, and War joined in with a low chuckle.
“So I see.” She gave a sniff. “We got her at the same time. Is that it?”
Death sighed, but he nodded.
“Fantastic blunder.” War laughed, deep and rich.
Emily peeked around Death.
“Then we made her together?” Pestilence put a hand to her thin lips. “Oh, she’s like our baby. Oh, this is so dear.” Her raspy laughter weaved with the others’. “She’s our child, brother, yours and mine.”
The light of Death’s eyes narrowed. “She ought to have been mine alone.”
“It’s a blessed event.” She stroked her silvery crossbow as she laughed. “I’m her mother, and you’re her father.” She turned to the other two. “Oh, congratulate us, won’t you!”
Famine threw up her hands to applaud giddily.
“She was scheduled for me,” Death shouted. Lightning struck the tumbleweeds, and they burst into a pyre.
Pestilence stopped laughing. “Well.” She sniffed, but then she smirked again. “Well then, you can have her. I do feel so bad for you, no longer having any victims. I bequeath this one to you. I give you sole custody of our child.”
“Soul!” Famine shrieked. Her emaciated horse sagged as she bent double in a fit of hysterics.
“You have a legion now, brother.” War’s armor rattled with his laughter.
“A legion of one,” said Famine between gasps.
“Just for you, O Death,” Pestilence continued. “So that you know there are no hard feelings.” She looked at her companions, then back down to Death and Emily before backing up her horse.
“Enjoy your spoils.” War saluted Death with his bloody sword and then spurred his horse into the sky. His solidity melted as he split the darkness and disappeared in a streak of wound red.
“Make sure she gets plenty to eat.” Famine cackled, slapping her horse’s rump. It staggered and took off as well. Her disappearance, black on black, left a puff of emptiness that grumbled among the clouds.
“Goodbye, my beauty.” Pestilence blew Emily a kiss. She took up her bow and waved it at Death as her horse followed the others into the night. They popped in a white burst and then smeared into nothing.
The sounds of the world’s end thundered through the valley. Lighting stabbed the earth again and again, and wind tore from the mountains. It snuffed out the fire and scattered the weeds in every direction. The clouds churned, rose, tipped, then toppled into a final echoing crash that rolled out in an exhausted haze.
Silence.
Gloom clung to the evening, too early fallen upon an irrecoverable day. The parched air sizzled in a way that made Emily’s
hair lift from her shoulders. “Holy hell,” she whispered.
“No.” For the first time, Death’s voice matched his clenched teeth. “No.”
18
Union
“I’m thirsty.”
On a high rock, stretched out on his stomach, Scott adjusted his binoculars. The land appeared deserted, but he stayed low, confident the dusty lump of his backpack blended with the boulder shadows.
“Hey, is that you down there?” he called in a low voice over his shoulder. “Or is someone else in metal shoes sneaking up on me? Did you have any luck?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Carol said from the other side of the ridge, closer to the road.
“Hey, did you hear me?” he said a little louder.
“Yes, I heard you.”
“It got dark way too fast.” Scott squinted harder through the binoculars for any definite shapes in the valley below. The wild flipflops in the air pressure over the last few minutes left him with a headache. The dust in the high wind also scratched in the back of his throat, and his body creaked, stiff and sore from spending all day in the car. He felt overheated, his back itched, and he’d scraped the center of his palm while climbing the rocks to get a look at the freak heat storm that apparently took place in only one small section of the sky.
And he was thirsty.
“I have no record of weather like this.” Carol kept her volume on low, but Scott could still hear every nuance of her wariness through the rocks. “Of lightning flashing in such a pattern.”
Scott sighed and cleared his parched throat. “Well, there’s no one out there. And whatever fire that smoke came from is gone now. I can’t find it. I think we’re fine to keep going.”
“This is bad,” she said. Her feet crunched the gravel around the boulders below his perch. “We are now on foot after dark. Your safety is compromised.”
If he heard the word “compromised” one more time, Scott was going to throw something. They’d had no luck with fuel on the highway and then took to side roads to continue their search. He adjusted himself on the rocks, mindful of his shotgun by his arm. They were in the middle of nowhere, no buildings, no places from which anyone, living or undead, could jump out and surprise them. He was on guard, obviously, but an attack ranked low on his list of concerns. “There’s no one on the road, right?”
“No,” she said. “But no stranded vehicles either.”
He scanned to the south. “You don’t— Whoa! What’s that?” His binoculars slipped from his fingers.
“What?” The fuel can made a hollow ring as Carol plunked it below Scott’s rock.
He tucked the gun under his elbow so he could use both hands to focus the binoculars. “There’s something out there.”
Carol scaled the boulders to crouch beside him. He pointed into the valley. “Do you see it?” he whispered. “I thought it was a big shadow, but then it moved. And look, there’s where the smoke came from, those bushes are all black.”
He put his face back to the binoculars and held his breath. As the shadow turned, Scott better saw the outline of a man-shaped figure in a hooded cloak. A white hand at its side stood out against the dark like a dim star.
“Human?” Scott slid backward on the rocks. Carol’s eyes flicked to the green glow of her night vision.
“What do you think?” His voice quavered. He cleared his throat again.
“I’m not sure,” she said softly, her eyes adjusting to high focus. She glanced at Scott’s fingers, trembling around his binoculars. “What’s the matter with you?”
He gnawed his lip and shook his head. “Nothing. I don’t know.” Sitting up, he arm-pitted the shotgun. "What? Nothing."
She stared at him.
"Carol, just tell me what it is."
“It might be a vampire.” She edged around the side of the higher boulder. “Get back down.”
“Out here all alone?” Vampires always traveled in packs, caravans.
“You’re right,” she said. “It might be human.”
“No.” He shook his head. Somehow, he was convinced it was absolutely not human.
She looked at him for a moment, her silver-blue brow furrowed in uncertainty. The light of her eyes changed to paler green as she leaned to examine the valley. “I can see him better than you can.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s not— Hey, did it get colder out?”
“No.” She frowned as she faced him. “Get a hold of yourself, Scott. He is looking the other way.”
He shook his head again and shifted his grip on the shotgun. He lowered his face to the binoculars, but then dropped them. “Shit!”
Carol caught them and shoved Scott down. He slid off the back of the rock with a thump, and she jumped after him.
“He was staring right at me!” Scott batted her away from him. “I looked, and he was looking right back at me. And he didn’t have a face— Carol, did you see? He didn’t have a face. And the eyes. The eyes, they… Did you see?”
“Quiet,” she hissed at him. “Yes, I saw.”
“The eyes, the… What the heck is it?” His hands shook almost too much to loop the binocular strap around his neck.
“What’s the matter with you?” Carol reached for him, but he pressed against the rock and shook his head. Catch his breath, that’s what he needed to do. He needed to catch—catch his breath.
After a moment, he edged around to peek through a crack between boulders. “Shit.” He staggered back right onto Carol’s foot. “He’s coming.”
“We can take him,” she said. “He’s alone. I’m seventy-eight percent charged, your shotgun is loaded, and we have a forty-three-foot elevation advantage.”
“No, I—You don’t understand. I—You—I can’t explain. Do…” He took a shaky breath. “Carol, you don’t feel that?”
“No. Scott. What do you feel?”
His throat tightened to nothing. “He’s coming.”
She stared at him then shook her head with an artificial sigh and stepped back. She grabbed the fuel can in one hand and Scott’s arm in the other. Together, they ran to the road.
“Across!” She dragged him past a tower of boulders and through a weedy area sheltered by slopes.
“The car’s the other way,” Scott gasped as he sprinted to keep up.
“It is useless to us without fuel.” She led him through more rocks and around another hill. Carol jumped from a sloped ledge to crouch beneath a rocky ridge. Scott slid down with less grace, rolling into the shadows at her side. He put a hand over his mouth to muffle his ragged breathing.
After a minute of silence, she sat back. “I detect nothing.”
“We lost him,” Scott said between shallow breaths. He lowered his hand. It no longer shook.
“Maybe.” Carol took his arm, and though her grip wasn’t tight, he got the feeling it would be if he tried to get up. “But without my radar, my senses are limited.”
Scott shook off a shudder and eyed the roomlike space they’d dropped into. Rock walls taller than his head surrounded them on all sides, but one wider fissure on the far end looked like it led out. He couldn’t tell its direction, but Carol could also help him climb back out the way they came. His palm throbbed where he scraped it earlier and was bleeding again. He wiped it on his jeans.
“How far are we from the car?” He tilted his head back to analyze the haze-covered sky, but all stars remained blotted out.
“Not far.” Carol turned where she crouched to face him. “One-point-three miles. The road follows the shape of the rocks.” She took one of the straps of Scott’s backpack and tightened it for him. He hadn’t even noticed it was uneven.
“And you didn’t see anything we could pull fuel from?” Scott’s thirst grated his raw throat now. He slipped off the backpack and dug out a dented water bottle. He took a swig, then another, then stuffed it back inside.
“No.”
“Great.” He hoisted the backpack on again. “Just great. We should have gone the
other way. Where the road forked. Let’s go back there. I could put the car in neutral and you could push.” He winced as Carol’s eyes changed to that dark color they turned when she got pissed. “Well, this is your fault!” he snapped. “The plan was to take the straightest line to New York. We’re going completely the wrong direction.”
“Not completely.”
“And now we’re sitting here hiding from that thing that looks like some freaking Nazgûl.”
She shook her head. “There’s no direct route up to the road from that valley. Although that would not stop a vampire.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t a vampire.”
“I don’t think it is.”
“Then what was it?”
“Inconclusive.”
Scott sighed and rubbed at the moisture on his upper lip. “You don’t hear anything now?” He shivered.
“No.”
“I don’t know how it’s hot and cold out at the same time.”
“You’re chilled.” Carol studied him. “But the air temperature is sixty-eight degrees.”
His adrenaline did somersaults. Ignore it. “If we’re going to be walking anyway, I say we go back to the car and push it until we find something that’s got fuel.”
Carol’s eyes darkened again, but Scott lifted a hand. “What? I’ll help.”
She stood. “I do not need your help to push a car.”
“You’re the one who dragged us out here at turbo speed.” He got up as well, shook out his knees. “We should’ve siphoned more before we left that dog town this morning. Found some extra fuel cans.”
“We needed to leave,” she said. “That vampire could have followed me.”
“It was daylight!”
“Where there is one, there are always more.”
“Stop talking like a fortune cookie! What happened to your probabilities, huh? Now you agree with me? We don’t have to follow the safest possible course. We’ll never get to New York if we keep zigzagging away from every potential threat.”
