"I watched on as the Lamb broke open the second seal,

and I heard the second living creature cry out, "Come!"

Then another horse appeared, a red one. Its rider was given a mighty sword

and the ability to take peace away from the world.

And there was war and slaughter everywhere."

-Revelation 6:4

-Ω-

Frank found that the best way to talk about the encounter with the soldiers was to not talk about it.

He hadn't known what had come over him, but he was pretty sure that it wasn't human. How was it possible to feel so much rage? So much hatred towards a couple of people that he'd just met? Towards others who were justified in their actions? Who were afraid?

They'd found two shovels in a nearby shed and buried them, or at least what was left of them, in someone's front yard, and Frank didn't think that he could hate himself more than he did in that moment as he placed bouquets of partially-withered flowers, ripped up from people's lawns, onto the churned earth. They deserved better. They deserved a sermon with a priest, and if they weren't Christian, they deserved whatever their religion called for. He and Percy had basically desecrated the bodies, taking their bulletproof vests, helmets, backpacks, gas masks, and, of course, their assault rifles. Percy had taken Grover's boots, since they'd been about the same size, and the two of them had buried the soldiers hastily before taking off. The graves had been a rush jobs, and in a couple of rainfalls the bodies would probably start to peek out from the dirt, but Percy and Frank couldn't spare any more time.

"We have to get out of here before their squadron comes looking," Frank growled through clenched teeth as he decided to abandoned the huge military packs in favor of stuffing all the supplies into the tote bags. Blackjack should be able to carry it; their supplies had been dwindling, so the bags had been incredibly light beforehand. "We just killed people. I just killed two people."

"What do you mean?" Percy asked as he hopped onto Blackjack's back, grabbing fistfuls of his mane.

"Stop playing stupid!" Frank bellowed, and fear spiked in his gut as that same, roiling anger reared its head slightly and blinked blearily, not entirely awake and ready to kill. It would be soon, though, if Frank didn't calm his temper. Even so, he kept on, "I know you know something that I don't!"

"What makes you think that?" Percy demanded as he whipped Blackjack into a canter, and Frank knew that it was the green-eyed boy's way of trying to avoid the conversation. The survivor scowled and sprinted after them, and luckily Percy didn't seem to intend to leave him in the dust, slowing Blackjack's gait down to a trot after they'd gone a safe enough distance from the graves.

Frank wasn't going to let this go so easily, and as soon as he was jogging side-by-side with Blackjack, he was talking again, his tone accusing, "You killed that girl. You killed Annabeth. I killed Juniper and Grover, but you killed Annabeth. You-you…"

"Infected her," Percy finished softly, refusing to meet Frank's gaze.

"You said you weren't contagious!" the survivor bellowed, and he could practically feel the spittle flying from his mouth. His fists clenched at his sides, and he tried to take deep breaths, but that only made him sound like he'd run a marathon, his breath sawing in and out of his lungs despite the fact that his blood didn't need the extra oxygen.

"I never said that," Percy replied simply, finally leveling Frank with his green gaze. "You just assumed it." A muscle in his jaw jumped, and Frank felt his heart stop for a few moments. Blackjack let out a keening sound, a crow calling out a warning as dogs neared, and Frank was pretty sure that horses weren't capable of making that noise. In that moment, Frank realized that Percy wasn't just one of Frank's strays that the survivor had picked up and nursed back to health. As he watched Percy stare down at him, Frank couldn't help but compare him to a warrior. He looked like a horseman preparing for battle, a king rallying his troops, and no matter how pathetic his horse or how lackluster his muscles, he looked like a threat.

He looked like a monster.

"But how come I'm not infected?" Frank asked, feeling his fury draining, only to be replaced by fear. "Beelzebub's Print is airborne." Percy slowed Blackjack's trot to a walk, and Frank wondered if it was so he wanted to let Frank catch his breath or he wanted to be able to loom over the survivor even more than he already was.

"There's so much that you don't know, Frank Zhang," he murmured, his eyes flashing, and Frank felt like his stomach had been tied to a leaden ball and then tossed into an underwater trench.

"What?" His voice was shaking.

"Do I have to repeat myself?" Percy prompted, quirking an eyebrow. His expression was alight with humor, a sick, twisted kind that Frank knew that nothing native to this earth was capable of feeling.

"No, how do you know that my last name? I've never told you. Ever," he whispered, stopping in his tracks, and Percy pulled Blackjack to a halt, turning slightly to regard him.

"I'm pretty sure you have," he said. His words were so convincing, so full of vindication, that if Frank hadn't just seen three soldiers die gruesomely, he would've started questioning himself.

"I've never told you. Never during these past few months have I told you that my last name was Zhang. I didn't want to be reminded that I came from somewhere. That I had a family that's no longer around," Frank hissed. "How do you know? HOW DO YOU KNOW?!"

"I know a lot of things about a lot of people." Percy grinned a feral grin, and Frank thought he was going to pass out from fright. Sure, Percy had been a little weird, what with the talking to his horse and his overall zoned-out-ness, but Frank never knew that he was capable of this. If the Percy right now had been the one standing on the doorstep of the hospital, Frank would've kept walking. He would've kept walking and he would've never looked back. "If it makes you feel any better, my last name is Jackson."

"What's your reason for not telling me?"

"You never asked."

"Dammit, Perce!" Frank shrilled, so loudly that his voice spooked Blackjack a little. "What's going on? The cities crumbling? That's not an accident. You know something about this! You've always known something about this! What are you, a spy? A terrorist?"

"Oh, Frank." Percy's face softened, and his tone was like he was chiding a small child for doing something odd. "I'm so much worse than that."

He blinked and suddenly his eyes were white and cloudy, almost like Blackjack's, but this cloudiness encompassed his entire eye, swallowing up his pupil and leaving nothing but blank space.

"Oh my god!" Frank lunged for the weapons tote bag, but an invisible force shoved him back, tossing him a good twenty feet before he landed on his back on the sidewalk. "What the fuck are you?"

"You're asking all the wrong questions," Percy tutted, sliding off of Blackjack's back. The horse looked so much more horrifying now that the rider had revealed itself to be a monstrous beast. "I'll give you a hint: it starts with 'what the fuck' and ends with 'are we?'"

"What do you mean, we?" Frank spat, and he felt like he was going to start hyperventilating.

"Frank, you're not the sharpest knife in the shed, I hope you understand that," Percy scoffed, beginning to slowly walk forward. The only things that Frank could look at were his blank white eyes and his dead man's shoes. "Why do you think I kept you around? Surely not because I actually appreciated your company?"

Wow, that was a low blow. Over these difficult months, Frank had come to call them friends, and it made this revelation all the more worse. He'd been sleeping next to this thing. He'd been scavenging with him, surviving with him, befriending him, and now Frank was here in these suburbs with the blood of two soldiers on his hands and some sort of creature wearing his friend's face.

"What do you want from me?" Frank managed to choke out as he hauled himself to his feet, his eyes darting around to see if there were any bats or clubs or scraps lying around that he could hit this thing upside the head with. There was nothing.

"Oh, nothing," Percy told him pettily. "But we were destined to work together, and right now you aren't doing your part."

"I never agreed to work with you."

"Ah, yes, but you were chosen. Chosen by one who is greater than all of us." It was official. This guy was somehow salvaging drugs and had taken a whole fuckload of them. Maybe it would explain the white eyes, but not the invisible force that had shoved Frank. Not the way he killed Annabeth. "It's quite morbid, isn't it?"

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Frank bellowed, backing up a step for every step that Percy took forwards.

"Why, Armageddon of course," Percy let out a hysterical laugh like he'd just made the funniest joke, and it made Frank want to vomit. "The man upstairs truly has a sense of humor." Percy raised his hands, and his sleeve slipped down just low enough to reveal the black handprint on his wrist. His own handprint.

"A boy who hates sickness more than anyone forced to spread it." He pointed to Frank, his eyes glinting like razors. "A boy who lost his mother and father to war, forced to cause it."

Frank would've argued, but then he thought back to the way that Juniper had attacked Grover. The way that Grover had begun fighting back. Frank had told them to fight, so they'd fought.

Percy continued, his smile widening manically, "There are two, others, too. A boy whose sister starved herself to death because of a women's cult, who now bears a touch that makes everything wither and die. Another boy who lost everything to death, now holding the scythe. Fate has no pity, don't you agree?"

Frank thought his head was going to explode, thought he would pass out from fear and from a shortage in his brain. It didn't make sense. Nothing made sense. Sickness? War? Famine? Death? Time seemed to stop, and a single tear trickled down Frank's face.

No, it wasn't sickness, war, famine, and death. It was pestilence, war, famine, and death.

THE HORSEMEN WALK AMONG US

"Y-y-you caused Beelzebub's Print? You're the one who made all this happen, who killed all those people?" He was trembling so hard he thought he would shake right out of his own skin.

"Patient Zero, in the flesh," Percy chuckled, but there was no humor behind it. "Not only was I the first, but oddly enough, I was the one who lived the longest." His teeth looked like razors in the light of the dying sun. "It was me. It was all me, and it started when I grabbed the wrist of a nurse giving me food."

"Do you know what you've done?!"

"Very much so. It's in the job description," Percy sneered at him. "Too bad that the big G didn't tell me that it meant my family would die too. Isn't that wonderful? I was such a fool. But you, you didn't have a choice. You're special."

"Not in a good way," Frank bit, his fists clenching. His confusion and anxiety and terror were all being poured into a mixing pot and being stirred into a churning mass of fury. He wanted to kill Percy. He wanted to break the ex-patient's spine over his knee, because now he knew that he could. "I would've denied it in a heartbeat."

"I don't disagree, but see the thing I'm trying to tell you, Frank, is that we were all good people at one point or another." He paused, the hard, mangled edges of his warped expression softening a bit as he stared at his stolen shoes. "But you have to change. You have to change or else the guilt crushes you. You see Juniper and Grover? There will be thousands of more Junipers and Grovers out there. These Junipers and Grovers will be men, women, and children, and they will all fall at your hand."

"But I don't want that," Frank hissed, and Percy let out another hysterical laugh.

"It doesn't matter what you want, silly! It doesn't matter at all!" he cackled. "We're the harbingers of the apocalypse, the critically acclaimed Four Horsemen, and it doesn't matter if we want to or not; it's our fate. You were doomed as soon as you were conceived; your story is already written, Frank, and this is how it ends."

"I'm not a Horsemen. I don't even have a horse." Frank's voice was wet and cracking in places.

"You'll find it. Eventually. But I need you to understand that once you find your horse, we have to begin."

"Begin what?"

"Don't play dumb, you already know. We've already found our horses- God sent them to us. He can't communicate with you, though; you're uncontrollable. A loose cannon. A rebel that would like to do anything but bow and serve. You have to find your horse yourself, and the dawn afterward we will set out. Only America was affected by the famine, plague, death, and the crumbling cities- that's what happens when you're Chosen- but now the real Apocalypse has to begin."

"How will it work?" Frank had gone numb.

"We ride together. Unlike what it says in the Bible, it won't come in waves. It will be all at once. Crops will wither and die as people with black handprints on their wrists tear each other to shreds, and Death will collect their souls to bring them to Purgatory for judgement."

"There's a Purgatory?" Frank whispered.

"And a Heaven. And a Hell. We're bringing forth the Kingdom of God, and pray for anyone who dare stands in our path."

Frank said nothing, instead shouldering past Percy and towards Blackjack. The horse shuffled nervously as Frank rifled through the tote bags, and Percy watched on wordlessly as Frank found what he was looking for. The ex-patient gave him space as Frank dropped the thing on the ground and dug out a box of matches from his jacket pocket, his first match setting alight on the first strike. Expressionlessly, Frank dropped it and watch as the small flame grew and grew until it had erupted into a reasonably sized fire.

"Let's go," Frank rasped, and Percy nodded before clambering back onto Blackjack, who immediately began to walk on. Frank didn't look back.

As they left, the sightless button eyes of Bear watched them, before they eventually melted into nothing.

A half hour later, there was nothing left but ashes.

-Ω-

(A/N) There it is! The big announcement! Most of you already predicted it, but this was a pretty intense chapter nonetheless. PLEASE REVIEW I LOVED THE REVIEW SUPPORT LAST TIME PLEASE KEEP IT UP I WRITE FASTER WHEN I KNOW PEOPLE ARE READING.

Chapter title is from the song I Found by Amber Run