The Horsemen of the Apocalypse
The room was filled with silence, the kind of silence that crushes and cripples, stifling lungs and speeding the pulse. Victor’s grip on his wineglass tightened until spider-webbed cracks became jagged edges, and jagged edges became mirrored shards resting in a pool of wine bleeding into the white wood. His shirt was specked with cabernet sauvignon, flecks of festered red that he imagined multiplying if he accepted his apparent calling.
“No. Absolutely not.”
The Horsemen glanced at each other, their darting eyes debating who would explain until Jayne gave up.
“It’s not a choice, Victor. If you’re chosen to be a Horseman, then you are one. You can’t give back your ability.” Her voice was pretty, like bells as bronze as her hair, and church choirs. It was a sound that someone could fall in love with, if it didn’t belong to a woman who caused the starvation of millions.
“Can I control how to use it?”
She nodded. “The only limitation is that you can’t afflict other Horsemen.”
“Can’t or shouldn’t?”
Jayne locked eyes with Lincoln. He had been a Horseman for around two thousand years longer than she, and had caused the end of the Roman Empire. Although she felt that her affliction of the Irish was overshadowed by that on some cosmic scale of comparison, she did not let bitterness obstruct her work, and in the second their gazes met, she trusted his unspoken advice.
“Can’t. Our powers don’t affect each other, and we’re immortal unless we’re murdered.” Her voice quieted. “That’s what happened to the last Horseman.”
Victor flinched. Her words reminded him of memories he wanted to burn out of the recesses of his mind. He stared at the center of the circular table, where an iron horse, rearing defiantly pawed the air. “Do you really ride horses?”
Lincoln’s baritone rumble answered. “No. Ancient lore speculated such, but we travel like most humans.”
“‘Humans’? Really? Do you see yourselves as gods?” His scoff stirred the man to his left, a sunken olive face on a motionless body, thin and poisonous.
“When you have lived as long as we have, you stop feeling human.”
The silence fell again, as if from the chandelier. Ezra had that ability. Staring into eternity with a half-mortal mind had stolen the oldest Horseman’s patience for foolish questions, pleas for mercy, and disrespect. Victor understood this implicitly, and tread with more caution.
“Right. Sorry. So what do I do now? I’m supposed to go out and just start killing people?”
Lincoln sighed, extending a muscled arm to refill his glass. “The Ashen Rider usually follows the actions of the other Riders to finish what they started.”
“You create the cause of death, but I collect their souls?”
“More or less.”
“Great. Bloody brilliant.”
There was no more left to clarify, so the meeting was adjourned. When the four left the hotel, they parted, seeming to be nothing more than strangers. The End Times were near, and the ranks of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse were full.
* * *
The barroom in the heart of Damascus was smoky, with the peculiar, rich sourness of vodka and wine swirled by every turn of the ceiling fans. Lincoln sat alone at the counter, twirling the short stem of a quarter-full glass between his fingers as he watched the silent news report on the television. His awareness of his Western appearance gave him the sense that invisible eyes were watching and disapproving of his presence, although he was closer to his original home than he had been in decades. The words scrolling across a red band on the bottom of the news channel were of more help than the babbling of reporters reciting hollow stories for the sake of a paycheck. The Middle East was an experiment in self-control for him, to test if he could afflict but not destroy, utilize his power but not overuse it, fan a flame but quench a blaze. To some, the headlines might have demonstrated that he was failing to withhold enough, that he lacked the restraint he sought to assess. More children were recently recruited to the fighting, chemical weapons were used liberally, more civilian casualties occurring, more families torn apart and stranded. This was not the worst he had done, or would need to do by the end. The evening report shifted to breaking news, according to the graphic that flashed across the screen. A battle in Aleppo, five hours away from where Lincoln sat, had yielded “miraculous outcomes”, as the clean-shaven reporter read from his tablet. Though it was a skirmish as bloody as any other, there was not a single casualty, and testimonies were flooding in of soldiers with mortal wounds that were alive and receiving treatment. Churches were full of grateful, late night worshippers, and the battle was hailed as “the day death did not touch”. The statement rang slightly too true for comfort, and Lincoln wondered where the newest Rider was.
* * *
Jayne wandered down the dirt road toward the mercado, her sandals stirring the dust as she walked. Posters stapled to telephone poles proclaimed “Victory!” over a man with a triumphant fist raised, next to a woman wearing a lurid, neon pink dress and too much makeup. After the election six years ago, the image was plastered all over Granada on billboards and road sign poles alike. Despite the president’s promises of triumph for Nicaragua, the lower class had nothing of the sort in their combat against hunger. As Jayne passed the people with her eyes downcast, her gaze was drawn to shirtless children with their skin pressed against their ribs, old men with sunken cheeks, and women with eyes searching for ways to earn food for their families. In every face was evidence of desperate need, and she felt a twinge of something like guilt, but with a task like hers to carry out, she couldn’t afford to falter.
As Jayne haggled with a vendor over the price of a garnet hand-woven bag with an unidentifiable animal stitched to the front, a rancid stench pervaded the conversation. The shop owner’s brow furrowed, but he still drove the price up to 250 Córdobas. With a store around the corner from the meat market, such smells could be expected, especially in the dead of the dry season. The stinging in Jayne’s nostrils grew as the smell did, and she gave up, counting out the bills for him and taking her new bag.
She rounded the corner and was met with a fog of warm, rotting, raw meat. Flies droned around blackened pig heads, cow tongues, and white-veined beef cuts swinging from metal hooks. A woman scrutinized a display of decomposing fish, hoping for one remaining fresh pick.
“Josue!” A steak seller in a blood-streaked apron yelled across a walkway to a fellow seller. “Did yours rot, too?’
“Yes,” Josue called back. “Damn that witch.”
The witch, Jayne knew, was the president’s wife, as she was rumored at least. Abrupt misfortune was blamed on her, and normal misfortune on the government’s indifference to the poor.
"How would it be for me if they knew the truth?" She pondered as she left the maze of molded and discolored flesh.
Word spread about the meat market, and shoppers stopped coming that way. When an identical case destroyed the produce section an hour later, they started on their ways home without food. Jayne knew that she condemned many of them, but she found that she had lost real remorse early on in her career. They were fighting a holy war, after all, and duty is not something to shy away from in such a position. They were told to begin crumbling the nations, so crumble the nations she would.
* * *
Ezra did not believe in hesitation. He did not believe in fear.
He believed in following orders, and he believed in angry gods.
Ezra believed that anger was righteous, sent by those above to stir humans into action over wrongdoing. And Ezra sensed that he was being given anger towards Victor.
“He is useless!” The White Rider paced, his eyes furiously tracing the serpentine design on the thick carpet. “He is letting them live! You both know this! None of our work is fruitful and they have noticed!”
“Calm down.” Lincoln’s low voice did nothing to soothe him.
“Do you want to be struck from our positions? We have been given great gifts, but he is wasting his, and without him, we are useless!” With every step, the tension hanging in the air became more electric.
Jayne ran her hands over her travel-worn face and frazzled hair. “I don’t want to interfere; he’s going to realize I lied to him about our powers affecting each other sooner or later, and we can’t risk him lashing out. He’s the closest to immortality out of us all, and that’s dangerous.”
“I know!” Ezra hissed. “The gods-”
“Your gods gave Victor his position. He is the most powerful for a reason. You can only denounce his actions so far before they grow insulted.” Lincoln did not believe in the same gods as the Horseman of Pestilence, but what the former needed was quiet, an impossible thing around the hysterical muttering of an aged prophet.
“We need to afflict someone he is close to.” Ezra’s khakis brushed against each other in the midst of his frantic steps, like a rustling metronome counting every second they lost.
Jayne’s head jerked up, eyes wide. “No, it’s not dire enough to do something like that! He’s still adjusting; give him some time.”
“It’s been four weeks since he was appointed.” Lincoln’s fingers tapped out a rhythm as he spoke, Ezra noticed. Restlessness was a good sign. “Three weeks ago, there were no casualties in a bloody Syrian battle. There have been no casualties since. Two weeks ago, you contacted me about the lack of results from your trip to Granada. One week ago, Ezra’s outbreaks, even the ones in underdeveloped areas with no access to medicine, stopped claiming victims. People are starting to wonder; it’s impossible to not notice dropping worldwide death rates when nothing significant has changed. Victor is forsaking his duty and this hinders us in ours. I think Ezra’s right. We must remember what our goal is: we are here to further the Kingdom.”
Jayne nodded slowly.
“I will afflict someone he is close to.” Ezra slowed his pace and met the eyes of the other two. “It is the only way he will understand.”
* * *
Longing tastes like the ocean.
Audra was the first one to tell him that. She said it was because the tide goes in and out, like the fickleness of desire, but no matter where the tide is, the ocean is always there. Longing is deeper and more constant than simple, quick desire. Victor always tasted the ocean when he was with her.
The last time they were together, it was a Saturday on a boardwalk in the north. It was her idea to visit, and for the whole two hour drive there, they listened to a CD they found at Goodwill of an indie band they had never heard of. The music wasn’t much good, but they felt obligated to listen because they did spend $2.50 on it. As soon as they arrived, they went to a sunny-looking hamburger restaurant for lunch and bought pastel rolls of saltwater taffy at a stand.
Audra liked to call him Vic, and he hated the nickname, but he would have accepted almost anything she wanted to call him short of expletives. Love is about sacrifices, he knew. This is why when she dashed to him with another little handful of shells, he was happy to put them in his pockets for safekeeping, even though he knew she would forget about them until he returned them to her when they got home, and then she would remember and love them again. Sometimes he recalled the wisps of her caramel hair whipping about, pulled free from her bun by a briny gust, and other times tracing her dancing footprints in the wet sand nearest the water, his feet so much larger than the ghosts of hers. Music drifted down from the stalls and games up the dune, and she swayed to the rhythm with a certain delicacy from her place at the edge of the surf, letting seafoam hiss across her toes. Her eyes reflected the sage green ocean as they sat on a pearl colored blanket next to crumpled, empty chip wrappers and hot dog papers stained with mustard. The setting sun glowed as it sank to its bed on the outside edge of the sea, lighting her hair and the edges of her profile with little gold light-dots, like the electric bulbs strung up along the boardwalk.
On the way home, she fell asleep with her head against the window, so Victor avoided the bumpier roads so as not to wake her. Sometimes a streetlamp would cast its light on her just as he happened to look over, and her freckles stood out like stars. He escorted her up the walkway when they arrived to her house, and he held her for a moment on the porch. He let himself hold her tighter that day, and when he stepped back, he let the love show clearly on his face, but hid it again before saying goodbye, fearful that she would see and understand.
Two weeks later, Victor received a call from Audra’s brother.
That night, he screamed.
He screamed until his throat was raked red, and his eyes were bloodshot with crying, and he swore, and broke a picture frame, and he felt dehydrated but didn’t want to drink, because then he would gag and retch and his insides were already inflamed from not eating. The neighbors called the police, and the officer who arrived found him sitting on the living room floor clutching a handful of shells.
The funeral was that Saturday at a mortuary in the east. He spent the entire time either in complete numbness or drowning under the weight of emotions and thoughts. There were plenty of flower arrangements around the room, and he knew she would’ve disliked them. Wildflowers were her favorite, not these trimmed and dyed store-bought creations. The more he looked at the paper-covered pots and neon blooms, the angrier he became.
“How was there such an oversight that they got flowers she would have hated?” He fumed to himself as the crowd dispersed. She was going to be cremated, and her ashes spread somewhere. He didn’t know where, but did not ask because if it wasn’t a place she would have wanted, he lacked the restraint in his grief that would keep him from stealing her ashes and spreading them somewhere better.
The next day, he received a letter requesting his presence at a conference in a meeting room at the U.S. Grant Hotel. He had never heard of the organization sponsoring the event, nor had he applied for anything of the sort, but he went mostly out of curiosity.
The room was empty except for a steel chandelier and a round spruce table at which three people were already seated. A thin-faced brunette woman wearing a crisp business suit idly sipped from a travel mug as a muscled blonde man in workout clothes to her left poured wine into two glasses and handed one to the professionally dressed figure across from him, an empty shadow of a man staring at nothing. They looked up as he entered, and he sat between the two men in the only empty chair.
They introduced themselves by two names, their birth names and what they were called now. The woman used to be Rosamund, but went by Jayne. The athletic man used to Amphion, but was Lincoln now, and the shadow-man was Indra, now Ezra. In order for him to understand their organization, the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, he needed to understand the bigger picture. As they detailed the spiritual war being raged invisibly in the cities and the streets, Victor felt his worldview shifting, as if his spine was suddenly snapped into alignment after a lifetime of one vertebrae being slightly out of place. All the questions he wrote essays about in university philosophy class seemed to make sense.
“So bad things happen because the world is falling apart, and now the end of it is coming.” He took a sort of morbid comfort in the fact that everything was in shambles because it would all soon die; at least it wasn’t entirely senseless ruin.
Victor leaned back in his seat as Lincoln passed him a half-full glass. “It makes sense. So is this a religious organization, and you want to convert me? Why only send one person a letter, then?”
Lincoln folded his hands. “Our job is essentially to be the embodiments of the forces that will bring the End Times, and we are given special abilities to cause the individual events leading up to it. I am the Horseman of War, Jayne is the Horseman of Famine, and Ezra is the Horseman of Pestilence. Recently, we lost the Horseman of Death. We are told who to choose as the next Horseman. We were told to choose you.”
Victor paused, mid-sip. “What does that mean?”
“It means you wield the power of death, and whoever you choose dies. Our powers are useless without you. We can create havoc and suffering wherever we walk, but without the Horseman of Death, it comes to nothing.”
“So I’m like the Grim Reaper?”
“In essence. What do you think?”
Victor looked at each of their faces in turn. Jayne bore an expression of hopeful expectance, Lincoln was stoic and straight-faced, and Ezra did not seem to possess emotion. He did not realize how hard he was squeezing the thin glass until it shattered, and he still only stared at the Horsemen.
“No. Absolutely not.”
* * *
One month later, Victor was walking home from work with a cup of coffee in hand. It was out of his price range, but he’d bought it anyway under the reasoning that a day as bad as his constituted some caffeine. The morning was full of harried mothers with crying toddlers, and by noon, he had to call his manager because a greying middle-aged woman pushing a cart full of groceries and discount swimwear blamed the fact that her card was not working on him. His phone buzzed from his back pocket as he unlocked the battered door to his duplex, but the sound was overlapped by the yipping of Oscar, his sister’s Miniature Pinscher that she coerced him into watching for a week.
“Shut up; it’s just me!” Victor yelled at the black beady eyes glaring out from behind the baby gate between the living room and the hallway. He collapsed on the sofa and pulled out his phone from under him, almost spilling the condensation-dripping coffee in the process. The most recent text from his mother gave him pause:
“At the hospital. Gabe couldn’t stop throwing up, they think it might be cyclic vomiting syndrome or a brain tumor.”
Victor drove to the city hospital an hour later to join his mother and stepsister, Coraline. The IV steadily dripped down a tube into his stepfather’s arm, like an hourglass of fluids instead of sand. The sleeping man was even paler than usual, and Victor stared at his silent form, chest slowly moving up and down with the beeping of the heart monitor.
“They don’t know what happened.” His mother said quietly. “While you were on the way, he stopped suddenly and just collapsed. They said it could recur, or never happen again. They won’t know until they place what caused it.”
“Where was he when it started?” Victor’s eyes never left the man’s face. Gabe wasn’t an old man, but he seemed to age as he lay in the bright room, on the strict bed with its rigid white sheets reeking of disinfectant. The harshly clean smell made his head float.
“He was at home, watering the front garden. He was only a few minutes, but I heard this awful noise and went outside, and there he was, keeling over the gardenia bush. And it just didn’t stop.”
“Hm.” A thought struck Victor and his stomach plummeted. “Did you see anyone go by the house?”
“No, why?” She looked at him concernedly. “Victor, are you okay?”
“I’ll get him water.” Coraline left, just to have something to do.
The memory of his meeting with the Horsemen hung over the back of his mind like the shadow of a menacing figure he didn’t want to turn and face. At times over the past weeks, he wondered how the ability to reap souls worked, and tried to wish death upon a wasp as an experiment, but it remained alive. He wasn’t sure if it didn’t work because they had no souls, or if the whole meeting was just a hoax and he let it get to him.
“Are you okay?” His mother repeated, ready to call the doctors a second time.
“Yeah,” he finally answered. “Just shaken up, I guess.”
Gabriel Moretti’s condition steadily worsened through the week, and so did Victor’s paranoia. He did not know how to contact the Horsemen, and he was not sure what to expect if he did. He assumed they would want him to start killing people, but that wasn’t an option.
“It’s been all over the news that death rates are dropping, but I didn’t think I was the only one reaping souls. They haven’t dropped off completely, so I’d assume someone else is working, but the deaths related to war, hunger, and disease are completely gone, and those are all the main causes of death. Damn it, why was I chosen? Whoever decided should have known I can’t do something like this; I’m not murderous or angry or vindictive, and now some crazy heavenly ambassadors are coming for my family and there’s nothing I can do. Audra would have good advice. Or she would admit that she had no ideas and suggest that we run away instead of solving the problem. And we would do it.”
Victor and his stepfather had a lucky bond that few fathers and sons are given. He never knew his birth father, but he wasn’t bothered by it because Gabe was a perfectly good substitute. They had similar tastes and views, and rarely butt heads except for once, when Victor wanted to get a tattoo and his stepfather said no, but it was his eighteenth birthday so he did it anyway. Gabriel supported his son’s artistic streak and passion for theatre, and Victor was grateful to escape a trope used in most coming-of-age films involving the tenuous bond between fathers and sons. The man encouraged him to use his talents, which earned him a sizable scholarship to college, and upon moving out, he was even more tearful than Victor’s mother. To see such an important figure in his life wasting away under an unknown and untreatable disease caused pain that was too familiar. His heart grew more bloodied with every update his family sent, and his conscience was rent until he received a call from an unknown number.
“He will suffer until he dies.”
The call ended.
“What?” Victor stared at the phone screen. It seemed too melodramatic to happen outside a D-list movie, but the words barely took five seconds to hear and he knew what his task was.
* * *
Lincoln and Jayne walked hand in hand down a bustling park walkway. They were posing as a couple, but if pressed, Jayne would admit that she was enjoying herself. They sat nonchalantly next to Ezra’s still form on a backless bench, and stared up at the hospital across the street where his gaze was already directed.
“They’re all up there?” Lincoln asked.
“Yes.” Ezra did not blink.
“Is it going to happen soon?”
“Yes.”
Their gazes converged at the same window. Jayne wondered if Victor could see them.
Ezra leveled his head abruptly and looked around, blinking as if he had never seen Labradors or children on scooters before.
“Did he do it?” Jayne asked incredulously.
Ezra nodded. Lincoln suspected that if he could remember how to show it, he would have looked surprised.
* * *
The monitor flatlined. The unwavering tone of the black and green screen echoed in Victor’s mind.
The doctor had warned them that the end was likely to come any day. There was no foreseeable cure after exhausting all the treatment options.
“It’s hard to fight in the dark,” one put simply.
Gabriel was awake when his wife took his hand, and his stepson and daughter moved their chairs closer to him. Victor wondered what would happen if they waited for death to arrive and it never did.
“I suppose he’ll be stuck dying forever, however that works. He’s in too much pain.”
As soon as the thought came, he wished for his father’s suffering to end, and it did.
“Death isn’t always a punishment. It can be a release.”
* * *
Jayne started to cry. She didn’t mean to, but sometimes remorse returned to her, and it was always at inconvenient moments. Lincoln put his arm around her and pulled her towards him, letting her tears stain his shirt. He was posing as her comforter, but if pressed, he would admit that he did not mind. Ezra, too, seemed shaken.
“I have done this for too long. I forgot why I was chosen. I have been working in vengeance, and not in servitude to my gods as they wished. It is time for me to go.”
Lincoln considered stopping him, but he understood. He felt similarly before, and did not believe it to be his right to hinder the man. Millennia of life tend to wear away at one’s self.
“Audra would be proud. She always wanted you to remember,” he called at the back of the receding figure.
Ezra stopped at the edge of the road. “Yes, she did. She would be proud of Victor for coming to understand as she did. He will be as fine a Horseman as she was.”
Jayne and Lincoln did not see him smile.