Pestilence

The first installment in The Four Horsemen series is set in a world where, five years earlier, four biblical horsemen appeared on Earth during a storm and rode to the four corners of the globe. In their wake, human technology collapsed: machines broke, the internet crashed, engines failed, and planes fell from the sky. The world never recovered, leaving people to rebuild in an age of oil lamps and makeshift trading posts. Now the first horseman, Pestilence, has reappeared and is carving a path of plague through North America. The disease, called "messianic fever," is universally fatal; its final stage is a horrific necrosis in which the body rots while the host still lives.

Sara Burns, a 21-year-old firefighter in Whistler, British Columbia, draws lots with her three remaining teammates to determine who will stay behind and attempt to kill the horseman while the rest evacuate. Sara draws the blackened match. She camps along the Sea to Sky Highway with her grandfather's shotgun and waits. When Pestilence arrives the next morning on his white steed, clad in golden armor, Sara is momentarily overwhelmed by his unearthly beauty. She overcomes her hesitation, shoots him from his horse, douses him in lighter fluid, and sets him on fire. She watches him burn for hours, retching and feeling like a murderer rather than a hero, and retreats to her tent believing he is dead.

Sara wakes to a charred hand at her throat. Pestilence, horribly burned but regenerating, reveals he cannot die and has killed every previous attacker across North America. He binds Sara to his steed's saddle and declares he will keep her alive because "suffering is made for the living" (20). His fury stems from the fact that when he begged Sara for mercy, she gave him none, establishing the word "please" as a charged point of conflict between them.

Days of brutal punishment follow. Pestilence forces Sara to run behind his horse until she collapses and is dragged along the asphalt. When she attempts to escape, he shoots her in the back with arrows and drags her through the snow until her arm is wrenched from its socket. Yet each time he pushes her to the brink, he pulls her back, cleaning her wounds and feeding her while insisting his care is merely pragmatic. Sara apologizes for attempting to kill him, not regretting her choice but expressing genuine sorrow for his pain. Pestilence falls silent, uncertain how to receive sincerity from a human.

Their dynamic shifts when Pestilence lifts Sara onto his horse instead of tying her behind it. Sara deduces that he controls who contracts the plague and has deliberately spared her. He confirms this but insists it serves his vengeance, not compassion. He reveals he rides until every human is dead. Sara begins engaging him in conversation and challenging his belief that human pleasures are beneath him. She also witnesses the plague's devastation firsthand, tending to a dying man covered in open sores and reciting poetry until he passes. Pestilence forces her into a hospital in the town of Squamish so she can look at the faces of people who will soon die, a deliberate cruelty meant to deepen her suffering.

A grudging rapport develops. Pestilence tastes apple pie and admits Sara was right: Not needing something does not mean you cannot enjoy it. Yet he remains ruthless. When Sara says "please" during a rainstorm, he uses the word against her and forces them onward. She develops hypothermia, and Pestilence rushes to a nearby home to warm her with his body heat. She wakes beside him only to realize a family with two young children lives in the house, all now doomed. Over four days, Sara cares for the family as they die one by one, pretending to be the mother of a little girl so the child might know some peace. The mother, Helen, tells Sara she does not believe punishment is the horseman's true reason for keeping her.

Later, by a campfire, Sara initiates their first kiss. Pestilence threads his hands into her hair and kisses her softly. That night he murmurs against her hair, "This is not lust I feel, dear Sara. And I hope you are half as frightened of it as I am" (189). When they stay with a hostile family, the father, Nick Jameson, drags Sara into the woods at gunpoint. Pestilence kills Nick with an arrow at the instant Nick's rifle fires, saving Sara's life.

They shelter with Rob and Ruth, an elderly couple near Seattle who welcome the horseman with warmth and spiritual awe rather than terror. Pestilence, who has never been simply liked before, is visibly shaken. As the plague claims the couple, Ruth forgives the horseman, extracts a promise that he will care for Sara, and privately tells Sara that loving him is not wrong, and that love may be the only thing that can save the world. Pestilence buries Rob and Ruth together, the first time he refuses to leave his victims unburied.

Their intimacy deepens. One night, believing Sara is asleep, Pestilence confesses he has been "indelibly changed" by her (240). Sara hears every word. On a balcony at a woodland cabin, she tells him she no longer sees a monster, just a man, and guides him into sex for the first time. He reveals that a glowing marking on his body reading "Mercy" is the reason he initially spared her: a sign from God that stayed his hand. The next morning, he proposes marriage in a church, believing sex constitutes a binding commitment. Sara refuses, and they argue before reaching an uneasy truce.

A gang ambushes them with a roadside bomb, destroying Pestilence's horse and critically injuring him. They nail the horseman to a telephone pole in a mock crucifixion and set him on fire. To further torture the horseman, one of the gang members, a man named Mac, taunts Sara and shoots her in the torso with a shotgun. Pestilence, charred beyond recognition, drags himself to Sara and curls around her, sobbing. Sara briefly dies and encounters Thanatos, the winged Fourth Horseman, Death, in a luminous void. She insists on returning to Pestilence, and Thanatos releases her.

Still barely regenerated, Pestilence carries Sara to a hospital. When the staff refuse to treat her, he unleashes a lethal plague on the building, killing dozens instantly, but keeps enough staff alive to perform surgery and save her life. He commandeers a mansion and nurses her for weeks. He confirms his feelings plainly: "Yes, Sara, I do" love her (343). They make love again. The next morning, Sara discovers a catastrophic outbreak has spread across the entire West Coast, killing millions. Pestilence reveals he unleashed the plague at vast distance to avenge what the gang did to her. Sara begs him to stop, calling him "love" for the first time. He refuses. She tells him his love has brought out his worst nature, not his best, and that God's mercy was never meant for her alone. She walks out.

Pestilence locks her in the bedroom. For eight days, neither speaks. On the eighth day, he throws his crown on the floor and tells her she is free. Sara walks away without looking back. Weeks later, traveling north, she learns that every infected person recovered and Pestilence has vanished. She realizes he reversed the plague before releasing her, but she never checked the news. Devastated, she returns home to Whistler, where her parents are alive. Her teammate Briggs died helping the sick. Sara resumes her old life but feels profoundly lonely.

Months later, Pestilence appears at her door in a flannel shirt and jeans, his divine trappings gone. He tells her he is "Pestilence no longer" (381) and that his plague will never infect another person. He followed her the entire way home, watching from a distance. Sara tells him she loves him. He says he stopped the plague "because love brings out the best in you" (384). He kneels and presents a gold ring forged from his melted-down crown and armor. Sara says yes. He chooses the name Victor, explaining that he came to conquer the world, but one of its people conquered him instead.

In an epilogue five years later, Sara and Victor live overlooking the Pacific, their home scattered with children's toys. Victor goes pale and tells Sara the wheel of fate still turns without him and that he can feel his brother waking: "War is coming" (395).