Chapter 11

They galloped across the skies, the world streaking beneath them in colorful waves that rippled when Lisa glanced down. Or maybe her tears distorted what she saw. It didn't matter. Her problems were far away, a lifetime away. They rode the path of Famine, and for a time, Lisa didn't think of herself. Instead she lost herself to the thrill of the ride—the way her hair whipped back, the feeling of the horse beneath her. On Midnight's back, Lisa was free.

Freedom, of course, came with a price. And that payment came due as they slowed over a mountainous terrain, passing over verdant jungle: dew-kissed emeralds and lush jades; darkling peridots and sunny chartreuses. Everywhere, it seemed, were green fields, a farmer's delight. The vegetation spoke of life and health, and it lightened Lisa's heart.

But then they swooped low, and she saw that the crops were riddled with desiccated stalks and brown husks, tantalizingly green at their tips but rotted at their bases. Entire fields of maize and paddy had been destroyed before they even had a chance to ripen. Ruined before maturity.

Starved.

Lisa swallowed thickly as she peered at the crops. And her mouth twisted in disgust from the gray-brown bodies that undulated within all the green like a river of cancer. Rats—thousands of them; hundreds of thousands. They devoured the living smorgasbord in an almost lazy way—scavengers, even when sated, never ceased in their hunger for more.

Midnight touched down at the outskirts of a dusty village littered with shacks. Fences separated the fields from the washed-out town, and Lisa realized they were trying to keep the rats out of the crops. It was as fruitless as the trees on the mountain; fences and traps couldn't contain such a plague. Looming poles dangled vermin with snapped necks, but where ten rats were caught, thousands more roamed free.

Free, like her. The thought made her cringe in her seat.

On Midnight's back, Lisa toured the land. She took in the desolate huts, the dilapidated structures that listed in the wind. She watched brown-skinned farmers, barefoot and thin, as they tossed rats into debris piles of shredded wood and dead crops. Men with sinewy arms hoisted line after line of dead rodents, but it did little good. Their crops were ruined, sacrificed to the vermin god.

And as the scavengers feasted in the fields, the villagers starved. Lisa saw mothers ignoring their own raking hunger pangs as they fed their emaciated children, babies with their stomachs bloated and their limbs like twigs. She saw fathers toiling to catch rats or to hunt in the neighboring jungles for food. Even the livestock—pigs and cows and chickens—were scrawny from hunger, their ribs all too clear beneath their bodies as the animals rooted in the dirt. In one large hut, dozens of men and women gathered by cook pots, sharing the little food they had: yams and bananas and leaves from the jungles around the village.

And rats, of course. The villagers ate the very creatures that were forcing them closer to mass starvation.

Lisa could tell what was in the cook pots, even as she could tell the rats from the dirt. She was Famine, and she felt the people's hunger like a monstrous tick burrowing under her skin. Groaning, she wrapped her arms around her stomach. This wasn't incessant appetite or some internal appeal to be fed that she could ignore. This was a tortured beast bellowing, scrabbling toward either survival or surrender.

This was unbearable.

"Why did you bring me here?" she whispered.

Midnight ignored her question and walked on, weaving between ramshackle dwellings and empty storage huts. When the horse came to a halt and knelt, Lisa breathed in a sweet odor like leaf rot and spilled honey. Deeper, though, was the putrid stench of spoiled milk in the sun.

Lisa stared at the scene before her, shocked into wide-eyed silence.

The bodies looked almost like dolls—life-size dolls of flesh stretched too tightly over skeletons. Gravediggers worked, their mouths and noses covered by dusty bandannas as their shovels winked almost merrily in the sunlight. The people watching leaned against one another for support, or out of exhaustion, or maybe because they just couldn't stand upright any longer. One woman sat at the edge of the pit, her tears gleaming like jewels, her sobs silent. On her lap was a doll of a child, its eyes closed.

Numb, Lisa counted the bodies. Six people dead, and five of them were children. Babies. She had asked her steed to take her to Death, and it had—but not the death she'd wished for.

Wishes and horses, she thought, feeling hollow and sad and mad and sick. Her stomach lurched. Lisa clamped a hand to her mouth and told herself not to vomit.

"You get used to the stench of death," a man said, "but the smell never really leaves you."

Swallowing the bile that had risen in her throat, she pivoted to face a tall man seated on a white horse. Dust hovered around him like a nimbus, but the white of his coat—and of his horse—remained immaculate, untouched.

She stared at him, at his horse, at the silver crown that sparkled on the man's brow, bright against his greasy black hair. His pockmarked face was waxy, his eyes rheumy. Cold sores peppered his mouth like lipsticked kisses.

Yuck.

She focused on the scarred man, even as the smell of death teased her like perfume dancing on a breeze. "You're a Horseman," she said, her voice tremulous from almost vomiting—and, honestly, from being so close to a man who looked so nasty.

His smile was a perfunctory flash. "Pestilence."

Remembering her encounter with War, and how she'd nearly gotten her hand bitten off, Lisa didn't offer to shake hands. Besides, she really didn't want to touch him. She wondered if he had leprosy.

"Of course I do," he snapped. "I bear all diseases. It's my lot in life."

Great, another Horseman who could read her mind. Embarrassed, she bit her lip. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings." It occurred to her, then, that she sounded exactly like Suzanne.

"Of course you didn't. People never mean anything they say or think." He snorted, and snot flew from his nostrils.

She blushed, but the White Rider kept talking—ranting, really.

"'How are you,' they ask, and they never really want an answer. No one wants to hear about how people are slowly dying a little more every day."

Lisa, unsure of what to say, held her tongue.

"People are hypocrites," Pestilence said. "It sickens me."

"Um." What did one say to someone like him? "Are you here because they're sick?"

"Of course." He looked down his nose at her. "Much as you're here because they're starving. Famine and Pestilence work well together. We always have."

"Oh?" She pasted a smile on her face to hide her disgust.

"Look at these villagers," he said, motioning with a white-gloved hand. "Normally self-sufficient, they had once again planned on their crops to support themselves. But then the bamboo flowered. Life," he said with a smirk. "Life begets all evils of the world."

Oh boy. Lisa's smile slipped. "Bamboo flowers?" She'd thought bamboo was a reed. Her mother had a collection of bamboo baskets.

"And with the flowers came the rats."

Lisa shuddered.

"And the rats, once here, feasted on bamboo, on maize, on all manner of crops. Entire fields, destroyed overnight." His pink-rimmed eyes glistened either with disease or with tears. "With no crops, the people gather what they can. Yams, dug out in the jungle. Bananas, too, when they're lucky. Roots and leaves."

"And rats," Lisa whispered.

"And rats," he agreed. "And that's when they're fortunate enough to have food to go around. When they don't, they starve."

"How about a slice of toast?"her father had asked her just this morning. And she'd said no, because the Thin voice had warned her that the toast was eighty calories. Once again, Lisa thought she would vomit.

"Children die soonest," Pestilence said, "as do the elderly and the sick. Even if they don't die of hunger, they suffer from diarrhea and gastritis, which in this place leads to death. With no crops to sell, there is no money to buy mosquito netting, and so at night their bodies are a feast for mosquitoes. And in the morning they awaken with malaria. Yes," he said, "Famine and Pestilence have always worked well together. And we pave the way for Death. We are Death's harbingers."

Her head spinning from the White Rider's words, Lisa said, "And War is Death's handmaiden."

"War," Pestilence said, sneering. He spat noisily, and where his spittle landed, the ground sizzled. "War sees this all as a glorious battle."

"It's ... not?"

He shot her a pitying look. "A horseman is one who rides a horse. There's nothing in the description that calls us to arms."

"Then..." She looked at the burial, then back at the White Rider. "Did you cause the sickness here?"

He snorted. "Did you cause the famine?"

"Of course not," she said, shocked.

"Like you, I was drawn here. We don't cause the ills of the world, little Famine."

"Then ... what are we supposed to do?"

"Do?" A horrific smile oozed along his face. "A thousand rats destroyed this village practically overnight. The Great Pestilence wiped out more than seventy-five million people in the fourteenth century. Smallpox killed more than three hundred million people in the twentieth century." He paused, searching her face. "What makes you think those numbers couldn't have been higher?"

She blinked. "What?"

"Do you have any idea how easy it would be for a plague to annihilate all of humanity?" he said drolly. "Especially these days, with scientists mucking about in their labs, all those diseases lined up like toy soldiers?"

She could picture it all too easily.

"I am quite busy keeping things in check, thank you very much." Pestilence brushed at his collar, as if to flick away the dusty aura surrounding him. "You'd think I sit around, whiling away my time eating chocolates."

Hershey's Kisses, the Thin voice said. Twenty-five calories.

Shut up, Lisa scolded.

Amazingly, the Thin voice fell silent. Lisa had never stood up to it before.

"Unlike War," Pestilence said with a sneer, "my duty is both local and global. Disease is rampant, pandemic. The Spanish flu killed twenty million people around the world. More than thirty-three million people have AIDS today."

Lisa's head swam as she tried to understand his words. "So you ... help people?"

"Well, if everyone dies, I'd be out a job, wouldn't I?"

She waved a hand at the villagers. "So help them! Cure them!"

His liquid gaze locked on to hers, and she thought he was trying to tell her something silently, implore her to action or to understanding.

"You know," he finally said, "you and I are very much alike."

The very notion nauseated her.

"Famine attacks people from without, destroying their food sources. Pestilence attacks from within, destroying their bodies. But whether from without or within, we achieve the same result. We destroy."

"What are you saying?"

"We are the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, little Famine. We don't cure people. We destroy. That's all we've ever done."

Lisa turned away from him. She didn't want him to see her cry. Slowly, the villagers buried their dead.

"As early as 200 B.C.," Pestilence said, "people experimented with vaccination. The Chinese, the Indians, the Turks; they all dabbled. Then came Edward Jenner, with his theory of milkmaids and cowpox. Humans have gone from gifting natives with smallpox blankets to eradicating smallpox completely. You see? People can fight using disease. Or they can inject themselves with it to cure themselves. But whichever path they choose, they first must understand disease intimately."

Lisa frowned.

"The first thing you must do, little Famine, is understand hunger."

She faced him, holding her chin high. "I think I already do."

He inclined his head in acknowledgment. "Indeed."

"So you're saying I don't have to hurt people?" she asked, her words hesitant. "I can help them? Somehow?"

He smiled again, twisting his face into a parody of mirth. "As I said, you and I are very much alike."

She looked down at her hands, remembered what she'd done at the restaurant just yesterday, at Joe's Diner the night before. "But how?"

"That you'll discover as you walk your path. Or," he said, "as you ride. We are Horsemen, after all."

"War said that my purpose was to get people to fight about food, and then she'd do the rest."

"Yes, well, War has been known to twist things her own way. She's the politician out of the four of us."

Lisa looked up at Pestilence on his white horse, like some mockery of a knight who'd come to save her. "What does that make you?"

"The philanthropist," he said, tipping an imaginary hat. With that, the White Rider nudged his steed, and both man and horse disappeared in a cloud of dust.

Lisa stayed until all six bodies were in the ground. When the last shovelful of dirt filled the pit, she quietly said a prayer for the dead. She wasn't a religious girl, but clearly there were powers out there; she and the other Horsemen were proof of that.

"God," she said somberly, "their deaths were stupid. Please welcome their souls to heaven, because they deserve better than what they got here." After a moment, she added, "And if you don't mind, help me figure out my path, like Pestilence said. Um, please. Because as messed up as I am, I don't want to mess up other people. Thank you. Amen."

As she and Midnight turned to leave, she thought she heard a familiar voice say, "Go thee out unto the world."

But when she looked around for Death's familiar face, she was alone.