Apocalypse (29 page)

Pausing at the bottom of the ridge for breath, he pulled the letter from his pocket, tore it open and read it.

The chesty tremolo of the mine was in his ears, his mind; the words meant nothing to him. Tammy, displaying deviant behavior? A prepubescent girl approaching strange men like a streetwalker? Hospitalized for observation? Owen, showing stainlike, reddish patches of insensitive skin and loss of feeling in his fingers, the classical symptoms of—leprosy? Leprosy. Absurd. Who were these people? What were they to him? He could not remember their faces; he could not remember his own name. Who was this hysterical woman writing in such a heightened tone? Another one demanding his help, his heart, his soul. Well, they had taken his soul, Cally and all the Hoadley poor souls between them, and they could keep it for their very own. He felt much better without it.

And speak of the devil, there was Cally on that damn black horse of hers, along with those other damn women she liked to pal around with, on their own ridiculous animals.

Mark laughed—or thought he laughed—and started forward.

Elspeth jerked her head up at the first stutter of that sound, looking for a charging bear. She knew a bear when she heard one, and she knew there was nothing more dangerous to a rider on horseback than a bear; any horse would go crazy at the mere smell of one. The horsewomen, riding along the black brickle mine road, reined in their mounts sharply when they heard that coughing roar, but had no time to do more before Mark burst out of the woods. Clinging atop their rearing horses, the women gaped; the man lunging toward them was running berserk, his name-brand polo shirt nearly ripped off his torso by snags and briars, his skin torn, his eyes as wild as his knotted hair, but—those things were the least of what made them stare.

Mark flung the letter at Cally as he had flung the beeper at the boulder, but the letter did not satisfy him by hitting with a smash; it swayed in air and fluttered wimpishly to the ground. With a snarl Mark turned away and loped off down the mine road. He was so bizarrely changed that not until he was out of sight did Cally realize who he was.

“Mark!” She started after him.

“Wait,” said Shirley in a voice so stunned it entirely lacked its usual volume and resonance. “You sure that was Mark?” Shaken, distressed by the events of the past few days, she felt sure of nothing, but she thought she had seen claws, a stirring of horns in the wild man's hair.

Cally wasn't waiting, though Devil fought her at every pace. With hard black boots she kicked him into a run. With her own peculiar grim glee, eager for trouble as always, old Gigi sent Snake Oil after her. Shirley cursed and trailed after. Elspeth, last of all, slipped down from her plunging Warrior and picked up the torn envelope lying on the ground before mounting again and following.

She galloped, then, to catch up with Shirley, who had galloped and caught up with Gigi. Cally, on runaway Devil, was still somewhere ahead. Incredibly, Mark—or whatever it was they had seen—seemed somehow to have run faster than them all. And trees lay strewn on the black gravel mine road as they neared the tipple, half-grown trees broken off above the ground, their trunks splintered or dangling. The place looked as if a twister had savaged it. Yet no storm had struck, and the trees had been trembling skyward an hour before.

No one could hear hoofbeats, splintering trees, the thunder of her own heart; the clamor of the mine superseded all other sound. As if some chauvinist man had dared them on, the horsewomen galloped through the devastated woods, jumping treetrunks when they could, dodging others, impatiently circumventing the rest, fighting their way through the bewilderment of downed timber like ants through a pile of jumbled pick-up-sticks—

The mighty cat-purring nose of the mine abruptly ceased, leaving the woods in deathly silence. Even the cicadas had fallen silent, listening for the scream—the first scream of that apocalypse day.

It came.

Mark had known in an instinctive way where he was going. A beast needs a lair.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Gigi had arrived at the stable on that day wanting to go horseback riding, and the force of Gigi's presence generally impacted on those around her. The thick corpse-white callus of her scarred skin seemed to define her, let her walk hard, talk like dropped stones and take her own way. She found Cally and Shirley and Elspeth in the farmhouse still dazed in early afternoon by the events of the night before, and with the tug of dry words and cold fingers she pulled them out to go riding with her.

Once Gigi had gotten them moving they were glad enough to oblige. Each deadlocked, wrestling with her own devils, they welcomed the riding as a talisman of control, of mastery; once they had ridden a while, they would feel a sense, however illusory, that all was well, and they would be able to talk with one another again. Though that was not their aim, to intercommunicate, to act as a phalanx of four. They went, each one, as a personal venture, in search of a personal answer.

Saddling Devil in his stall (since he would not stand in the stable aisle) Cally could look at the others without her scrutiny's being noticed. Gigi, so wonderfully self-possessed that the mood of the others could not squelch her, chirping baby talk to Snake Oil; if there was any tenderness left in her, it was all for the horse. Elspeth, darkly shaken, saddling Warrior in silence. Like Cally, Elspeth and Shirley had not eaten that day. Cally had cooked bacon and hash browns and raspberry-jam omelette, urging the heavy brunch on the others in order to vicariously feed herself, but no one had eaten. And Shirley, also silent, pale even in the honeyed afternoon light: big-boned, hearty Shirley who had always laughed loud, whose flushed face had always resembled the round, peach-hued, nodding bloom of a manure-grown German rose …

“Shirley,” said Cally, the name surprised out of her by her own shock at what she had seen on the pale skin in the sunlight.

Shirley came wordlessly to the stall, looking over the dusty partition at her, and even though she knew everyone could hear her, could see what she had seen, Cally spoke softly.

“You've got spots.”

Shirley glanced down at the hard, elderberry-blue lumps on her arms and nodded.

“They're not just bug bites or something.”

Statement, more than question; Shirley did not bother to shake her head. As well as Cally did, she knew that the small meek-looking bumps were not spider bites or pinpricks or zits.

“I heard you coughing in the night. Sounded like smoker's cough. But you don't smoke.”

“Never did,” said Shirley.

They looked at each other. Cally felt the small muscles twitching and blinking around her eyes.

“Go ahead and say it,” Shirley told her. “It's starting already.”

“What's starting?” Gigi sang out with cheerful insensitivity from the end of the stable, where she was standing, waiting, with Snake Oil. Elspeth and Cally looked down at the horse muck on their boots, but Shirley answered.

“AIDS.” Curtly. Elspeth's dark eyes flashed up, outraged and pleading.

“Don't say it any more!”

Shirley retorted, “Don't make no difference now, does it?”

They rode. They mounted their horses: the black, the gray, the blood bay and Gigi's mount the color of parchment. Four women far too old for juvenile pastimes, they rode: Gigi half eaten away by her own impending death, Cally starved nearly to a skeleton, Shirley with the raven of AIDS skulking sharp-clawed on her shoulder, and Elspeth with a weapon as yet unbloodied. They rode down the ridge and along the valley amid the shaking shadows and the nattering of the mine. They talked about men and mobs, telling Gigi some of what had happened in the night, skirting the subject of what Shirley had been; odd, their feelings toward a woman who had been a man. Even the weird carousel-circling fence seemed easier to deal with than Shirley now that they knew what she was. They felt unsure of how to treat her, no longer willing to trust her with their thoughts, their confidences, though she was the same person she had always been.… And the Lord God of Misfits only knew what would become of her might-as-well-be-marriage with Elspeth.

And on the way back from their ride they encountered a man, perhaps mad, perhaps merely a representative specimen of his gender, wild with a primal rage that grew visible on his body in claws and bristling fur and horns.

And a few moments later they heard Mr. Zankowski scream.

In the middle distance they heard him, his voice echoing, clarion, through the woods. “Armageddon!” he trumpeted, in the reverberating word as much triumph as fear. “Arr-mageddon! Arr—” The victory call ended in a cry, cut off.

Cally reached him first, fell off over Devil's shoulder—the horse spooked from the limp-rag thing strewn on the brickle, from the smell of coughed-up blood, of deaths—Cally landed on her thin back beneath Devil's wild-eyed, wide-nostriled head grotesquely snaking down at her, beneath his lifted forehooves, but kept hold of the reins. Falling over the shoulder was almost routine to her. By the time the others rode up, she was kneeling by Mr. Zankowski's body (as flat and untidy as if it had been dropped from a tall building), holding Devil's reins in one hand and feeling for the prone man's carotid artery with the other, but finding no pulse, no sign of life. Mr. Zankowski's dead face stared up at the stained and murky Hoadley sky with a look of rapt repose, as if he had seen the glory of the coming of his Lord.

Shirley and Elspeth kept to their horses and hung back; they considered Cally their death-professional-by-marriage, and wanted no share of her expertise. But Gigi rode close, glanced down and said bluntly, as if out of sure, almost casual knowledge, “He's
ferrecht.
” Broken, wrecked, irreparably ruined, the old German word meant. Dead. Once, generations before, use of the term had been someone's idea of a euphemism or a joke, to say that a dead person was out-of-order beyond fixing, like a smashed watch, burned-out wiring, a dropped telephone, a vending machine permanently on the fritz.
Ferrecht
. “Let him lay.”

Cally stood up, aching from her fall; she would admit to herself now that it hurt her far more than it would have months before, when there had been some meat on her ribs, her spine. Even the saddle hurt her now that there was no flesh covering her sit-bones. She stood wobbling with pain and hunger, and all around her blades of raw yellow wood knifed up, kris-edged, from their stumps; poised flame in its near-primal form, one step removed from the sun. Flame. People said the world would end in fire.

Amid the splintered trees the mine mouth showed, a gaping, shadowy, stony rictus, as it had never shown before.

“How did he die?” Elspeth asked, keeping her distance and her perch on horseback, yet stretching her head and shoulders toward the body like an exquisitely beautiful vulture, as if the smell of blood drew her.

“How should I know?” Cally had not realized until she snapped the words how afraid she was. Of what? Mark? Of whatever had happened to Mark?

Did she still care about Mark?

“Let the coroner worry about it,” she added more temperately, trying to sound sensible. No, sane. By Hoadley standards, sane.

But Gigi declared with grim, gleeful, utterly crazy certitude in her voice, “The coroner ain't ever going to get this far. Coroner's going to have lots to worry about.”

“Let's get out of here,” begged Shirley.

Despite the panic lying just beneath the bravado of her loud voice, she reached over and held Devil while Cally mounted. Cally might not have managed to get on the tall horse otherwise; the last of her unnatural, flesh-burning energy seemed suddenly to have left her, and she was shivering with cold in the heat of late June.

Something moved black on the black brickle, and the horses violently shied. Like an emanation out of Hoadley coal the black snake wavered to the hermit miner's body, where it tested the poplin terrain with forked tongue, then laid itself in a spiral on the shabby, concave chest.

“Let's get out of here!”

“Out of here” meant home, to the stable, to safety; horses and riders felt fully in accord on that concept. They fought their way through the tumbled treetrunks again, and once again at reckless speed. Even Shirley seemed to have no sensible caution left in her. They lunged up the shortest, steepest trail over the ridge; the women clung to their mount's manes as if to lifelines, and once again in the clutching, clawing twigs just overhead the cicadas with human faces were chanting, chorusing, wailing: “Doom.… Doom.…”

“My God,” said Shirley in a dead voice.

She had stopped her big gray thoroughbred at the pasture's edge; they all stopped behind her to stare. “My God,” said Shirley with something more of personal affront, of umbrage, in her voice. “Skulls. Just what I love best in the whole wide world.”

Around the farmhouse the fence was once again circling, merry-go-twirling, round upon round, and the plastic ponies serpentined up, down, all colors in the sunlight—but their heads were skulls. Horned skulls, grotesquely large for their small bodies; the bone was dull black, the horns, hard mustard yellow or pumpkin orange or pink. Cally shaded her starved eyes from the buzz of that neon pink.

“Lord,” she said with a dazzled look, as if she was seeing the world whirling, multihued, flashing before her eyes like a life to a drowning swimmer, “Lord Jesus, is it to keep us out or keep us in or save us or kill us?”

“I don't want to find out.” Shirley's big mare was shaking and sweating, and so was her rider. With unspoken accord the four women turned their mounts and started away. Two cars, Cally's and Gigi's, sat outside the circling perimeter of the fence, but no one wanted to approach the weird thing even that close. Their horses now were no longer their playtoys, but their vehicles.

Where to go? There was only one place to go. The hub of the universe. Hoadley.

Devil had pushed his boorish black head into the fore, as always, so that Cally led the way through the abandoned strip sites between the stable and the town. Along the gravel road—hooves striking crisply on the black cinder surface—