With a Sickening Grin

I saw the white horse that night.

I didn’t tell Emmy. I thought there would be questions.

I had taken a walk some distance from our little camp so I could take my helmet off. When I met Emmy, she’d fallen into a pit trap, and I didn’t want to risk infecting her to pull her out. The first time she saw me in my HAZMAT ensemble, she screamed, which was fair enough, really. I spray-painted a smiley face on the front of my mask, and after that, she thought I was safe. I don’t mind it, most of the time, but it’s hard on the eyes, staring through an inverse grin.

When I was far enough, I took the helmet off, the carrying breeze pouring over my inflamed skin. The others always joked I was the sensitive one, and my swollen landscape of sores and blisters saw little relief inside a sweat-soaked suit. I’d only had a moment or two of soft, soporific air in the cool prairie night when the horse appeared.

It was white, but not like snow. Not like clouds or marble or milk. This white was like the underbelly of a burrowing worm, the white of fungus in the mire, the white of flayed subcutaneous tissue, robbed of sun and blood. Corpse white. Its mane and tail made of fibrous tendrils shedding toxic spores to poison the wind. It turned toward me, eyes jaundiced and ringed with red, weeping semi-translucent fluid down its mangey face. As it approached, each hoof trampled the grass, staining it with black mold and rusted blight, disease festering in its wake.

I ran.

With my helmet on, I dashed back to camp. I took a moment to steady my breath, acid lashing in my chest. My condition made me a pitiful athlete. But I calmed myself, and shook Emmy awake with a gloved hand. “We should go.”

Emmy grumbled and blinked in the grey lantern light. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“It’ll be dawn soon,” I said. “We can get an early start. Try to make it to the mountains today.”

We were trying to get to the mountains because that’s where Emmy’s people were going when she got lost. They’d believed there were places too remote for a virus to reach, where the soil had no radiation. I thought they might be disappointed, but people liked to have somewhere to go, rather than exhaust themselves wandering. It was amazing to watch the way people moved, so different from plants and streams that followed the path of least resistance. “You’re lively today,” Emmy noticed.

“Am I?” I slowed my pace for her little legs.

“It’s okay; I’m glad you’ve got the energy,” she grinned. “Are you feeling better?”

“I feel…motivated,” I decided. I did have to tell Emmy how I felt; she actually wanted to know. And the painted smile didn’t convince her. “Things carry out here. I want to get you somewhere safe.”

“I’m safe with you.”

I wanted that to be true.

There are many ways for disease to spread. Wind is one way, especially in plants, carrying spores of sapstreak or fire blight from tree to tree. Insects do a lot of that work, malaria hitchhiking on mosquitos and ticks full of Lyme disease. Water carries everything, Giardia, Norovirus, endless dysentery. And of course, people, glorious people, touching and sneezing and sharing food. Sharing beds, pressing skin against skin, smearing themselves together. Was there really any place they hadn’t touched? Was there anywhere infection couldn’t reach?

“Look!” Emmy tugged at my suit. “Down there! I think it’s a horse!”

A bowling ball of acid rolled over inside of me. I didn’t look. “There are no horses anymore.”

Choosing our route up the rocky foothills, I was thinking about what was behind us. I did not think about what might be ahead. And, like any human creating a path instead of following one, I encountered some resistance.

“Stay where you are!” said the first man. He had a gun, a few guns, but I had doubts about his supply of bullets. “Hands up, smiley!”

The second man had a knife that looked very capable of compromising a HAZMAT suit. “Are you two alone?”

I glanced at Emmy. She was shaking. “We know people who were headed this way,” I said for the both of us. “Do you know if there’s a settlement in the mountains?”

“Not for you, there’s not,” said the gunman. “What’s with the suit?”

The knifeman spat. “Either she’s infected, or you are.”

“She’s not infected,” I said. “I’m just trying to get her to her folks.”

“Shit, we’ll take her,” the gunman chuckled. “We wore out the last one.”

I’d seen evil. When the world drowned under waves of rage and pain, I saw suffering and cruelty in shameless exhibition. And every time I thought I’d seen the last of it, there was just a little bit more. “Emmy!” I shouted. “Run!”

The gunman took aim. I grabbed the barrel, my glove slipping as I wrenched the weapon away. It clattered on the rocks. I bent over to pick it up. Then, another gun shot me in the back of the head.

Pain seared through me in a bright lance. My ears were ringing as a breeze blew through the ripped fabric, my pierced skull. I couldn’t see with a helmet full of blood, so I took it off, the painted smile rolling over the sloped ground. I stood, the pain melting away as the hole in my head closed up again.

The two men stared at me with wide eyes. And open mouths. Big mistake.

Spores blossomed from my skin, a shimmering cloud of deadly replicants. What the men did not see, as I took off my gloves, were dozens of strains of lethal pathogens, microscopic soldiers that would settle and spread. I grabbed the gunman’s arm, and rashes erupted up his skin, boils forming as swollen lymph nodes blackened at his throat.

“Let go of him!” The knifeman rushed toward me, slashing with his blade. I caught the metal in my bare hand, blood oozing down the sharp edge with every transmissible disease surging for a host. The knifeman leapt back from the grip, shaking hot droplets from his fingertips. I grabbed his neck and pressed my lips to his. Blossoming cankers ruptured when he screamed.

“Stop it!” The gunman was up, with the gun that shot me in his shuddering, blue-tipped fingers. One of his weeping eyes had swollen shut. “You’re sick!”

And there, leaping up over the hill, was a white horse.

Slamming down on hardened hooves, my horse trampled the gunman, crushing his embrittled ribs. I turned back to the knifeman, dragging himself away as tumors and cysts bubbled through his flesh. Phlegm and viscera leaking in putrid snail trails and strangled sobs. I pitied him. I made it quick.

Running my hand across my horse’s balding hide, I said over my shoulder, “I told you to run.”

Emmy was frozen, my smiling helmet at her feet. “You…you’re a horseman.” Her lip trembled. Her eyes were very round. “All of this…the whole world…it’s because of you.”

I stroked my horse’s boney muzzle. “Yes, that’s my purpose. And my friends are out there, somewhere. It’s almost over. We’re just cleaning up.”

Pushing out of the ruined suit, it was an incredible relief to let my fevered skin breathe. I swung up onto my horse’s back. “I have to leave. You’re not safe around me.”

“I’m not safe anywhere!” Emmy cried. “Am I? You’re not going to stop! You won’t stop until we’re all dead!”

“That’s true,” I said. “But I could probably skip the mountains for a while.”

Emmy held up her hands. “What did you save me for? What was the point?”

If she saw herself for the marvel she was, she would never have to ask that question. Cocooned in my restrictive suit, staring out through a humid little window, she had been the only thing in focus in a bleached and barren world. But she looked so small, so ephemeral, once I was up on my steed where I belonged.

I told her, “We…my friends and I…we don’t hate you. We’re not here because we’re angry. We’re not hunting you all down for sport. I love people, I always have; your tenacity, your creativity, your ingenious evolution. Half the reason I’m here is because you all love each other too much. When I'm at my worst, it strengthens your desire to be there for each other. That’s amazing to me."

Emmy was still, a few strands of her hair lifting in a silent breeze. Turning my horse, I circled wide to stay downwind. "I care about you, Emmy. I like when people survive. But you all carry and spread evil like bubonic fleas. And the world is ending.”

She looked down at my smiling helmet full of blood. “I thought you were my friend.”

I really wanted to be.

I spurred on my steed and rode away fast. Hoofbeats thundered back across the prairie, a slipstream of deadly contagion washing over the rancid ground. I’d been hidden in my HAZMAT, but with my viral signature torching the wind, the others would find me. I would tell them evil lingered in this cauterized world. And we still had work to do.

I wouldn't tell them about my human friend. I thought there would be questions.