Harry Charn's Journey

As the days went by, people began to fall. Then everyone would swarm over the dead and snatch up everything they owned: money, food, clothes, even their flesh.

Soon, some people in the group began vomiting. Then they started shivering and convulsing, but no one cared. The moment someone stopped struggling, a crowd would swarm over them.

Before long, even more people were vomiting, convulsing, and shivering.

Later, Harry Charn learned from a dying missionary that it was cholera, a terrible epidemic.

More and more bodies lined the roads. Some villages along the way had not a single living soul left. At night, terrible noises filled the air: mosquitoes and flies buzzing, rats and wild animals gnawing at corpses, the sounds never ceasing.

Even villages where people were still alive wanted nothing to do with them. The villagers threw stones at them, and some landlords even had their servants stand beside the road with muskets to keep the refugees from sneaking into their barren fields.

Harry Charn had wanted to give up several times, but for some reason, his feet kept moving. Over hills, across fields, through rivers.

Suddenly, a group of masked gentlemen on horseback rode down the road. They wore beaked masks, drew their sabers, and killed everyone they saw.

One person knelt to pray, only to have his head smashed beneath a horse's hooves. Red and white matter mingled with the dirt stuck to the hooves as the horses galloped on.

Those who fled along the road were eventually caught and killed, one by one. Their bodies were dragged into a pile, then sent skyward in a blaze.

Harry Charn hid in the grass and silently watched it all. The flowing blood, the burning fire, the howling wind—before long, they turned that "funeral" into a conflagration.

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