Apocalypse (34 page)

“Probably will,” Shirley admitted. “Come on. This way.” She led off, and War followed at her side, menacing from time to time when townspeople failed to scatter from her path with sufficient alacrity. Shirley kept an eye on her. “No,” she protested once when War's sword came up, and she was relieved to see that the word had its effect.

They made their way around the still-standing gazebo and the tightly-packed crowd of misfits gathered near. War gave these people a glance and found them no threat. Obviously, they were refugees. At the far side of the pit, though, were enemies again, screaming and fleeing from something—but not from her sword, to War's chagrin—the fools were blundering into her very path! With an irritated snarl she lifted her weapon, awaiting the word to attack. Attack! Why did her captain not give the command? But when Shirley spoke, it was in a voice from which all her usual volume and confidence were missing.

“Oh, my God.”

War followed the direction of Shirley's gaze and looked, and saw: the beast was coming up over the lip of the pit.

Not the sleek black of black horse or raven wing, but a dusty coal-black, a choking, smutty, lung-disease black, and huge: To Shirley's eyes the beast was an unhealthy growth such as she had once cut off her gray mare's chest; a melanoma, but one the size of the ever-growing manure pile behind her barn; a monstrous throbbing cancer coming toward her on legs like draggles of blackened blood, entirely too many of them and entirely too quick for such a gross thing.… War saw something resembling an immense, rotting, warty fungus, alive, regrettably real, coming at her and seeming to grow as she watched.

Not even War wanted to attack that. War changed back into Elspeth with a shudder, and her sword hung limp from her trembling hand. The beast—it was of a curdled black, a perverted color, a color gone wrong, misconceived, misused, an artist's horror. It was enough to harrow her heart.

“Time to run for it,” said Shirley. “Come on!” Shady Lady was plunging into a gallop as she spoke. The horses were exhausted, but their first whiff of the beast's fetor on the air sent them into a frenzy of fear. They ran at top speed, Warrior lagging only a little behind the taller thoroughbred, up Cemetery Hill and out of Hoadley. Shirley tried to guide her mount past the people in the way, but the animals were running out of control. The gray mare knocked down a woman and child; Warrior, following at the thoroughbred's flank, leaped over the child but trampled the woman, and Elspeth moaned and dropped her blood-smeared sword to the dirt.

“Elspeth, are you all right?”

Shirley glanced back, saw Elspeth turn ashen under the tea-tan skin of her face. The steep hill had worn out Shirley's horse to the point where she could attempt control. She hauled hard on the reins with one hand, leaned sideward and clutched Warrior's bridle by the cheek strap with the other, intending to wrestle both mares to a halt. The horses swerved with her and tossed their heads and tried to pull apart, and in that frightened moment Shirley realized she was not as strong as she had been a day before. She cursed; she left a trail of imprecations along the path of the two ignorant, mule-mannered, pea-brained fathead animals, and she thought she was dead more than once before the horses stopped and stood still on the grassy hillside above the old Hoadley cemetery.

In scrub locust trees just behind her the baby-faced cicadas wailed and chanted their dismal song, less with abandonment now than with a certain fierce fulfillment: “Doom … Doom …” With a buzz of wings three orange-and-black hungerbabies flew to Shirley's shoulder. She glanced down at them, shuddered and let them stay. Let them crawl down her shirt if they wanted to and huddle between her pestilence-spotted breasts, if that could comfort them. She would not deny anything to anyone now. At her horse's feet the graves stood open, empty, each in mute rictus, as if they had a story to tell Shirley could not hear. Death … What would it be like? Sooner than she had ever thought, she would know.… She wished the horses had stopped anywhere but there. Then she pushed the thought and her horror aside. Elspeth was sick.

The erstwhile War was clinging to Warrior's mane, and as soon as the mare stood still she leaned over her shoulder and retched. There was not enough in her stomach to let her vomit as she needed to do; she heaved and strained, trying to rid herself of what troubled her.

“Yo!” Reaching over from Shady Lady, Shirley patted her friend's back anxiously. “You all right, woman?”

Elspeth quieted, panting, spitting, lying against her horse's neck to recover, and Shirley did not hurry her. From where she sat she could see the pit like a great open mine far below, and the beast still moving about near the edge as if searching for something to eat. Though Shirley felt a chill of remembered terror crawl up her spine and into her chest as she looked at it, the beast seemed no more than a dark and featureless, blindly questing insect at the distance. They had left it far behind.

Painfully Elspeth straightened, rubbing her mouth with her hand. She looked not at Shirley but down at Hoadley, what little remained of it. “I wanted to kill them all,” she said in a low, strained voice. “I wanted to take them apart.”

“No kidding!” said Shirley tenderly.

“Don't joke about it.”

“Who's joking? You don't want to talk about it, you don't have to.”

“I've got to! I killed people. I hate them.” Elspeth turned to face Shirley, her dark eyes narrow, taut. “I still hate them. I hate them all. They—people from Hoadley, they talk about how they're all family, all friends, but it's like Cally said, they only like you as long as you do what they want, say what they want, think what they want. They want to own your soul.” The words were bursting from her, Elspeth the scornful, Elspeth the self-possessed, and when she said “you” she meant Shirley; it was Shirley who had suffered from Hoadley's stranglehold, not she. It was Shirley who had come back to live as a stranger in her own home town, and how anyone so big of heart had ever come out of that meager-minded place was beyond comprehension.… It was Shirley who was sitting pale on her horse, the sarcomas growing on her by the moment, and smiling faintly with rueful affection.

“That's the way they are, all right,” Shirley admitted.

Elspeth's eyes widened, became liquid, shadowed, gazing. “But you, Shirl—” A gulping pause. “You—you've always loved me no matter what.”

“Sure thing!” Shirley blinked; how else could she love Elspeth? Love anyone? It was the only way. Lord, to think that Elspeth had to say something about it, as if it was something new to her.… Shirley's big hand went out to her, because the little brown beauty looked like a stricken deer.

Their hands clasped across the gap between their horses and their lives. Hands gripped, the slender brown hand of the artist in Shirley's larger one, far too pale. “Sure thing,” Shirley repeated. “What about it?”

“I've been thinking the least I can do is return the favor.”

“Hell, Elspeth—” Shirley was not used to talking about these things and could not find the words to say that love demanded no such favors returned. Love asked nothing. But surely Elspeth understood that?

Maybe not. But the little sword-carrying fool understood something else. “Let me say it!” Elspeth lifted her exquisite head. “It shouldn't matter that you were born a man. It shouldn't matter that you didn't tell me everything. You're you. Who you are. The person who brought me home.” She raised their clasped hands into a salute, a soldier's gesture of sisterhood. “That's all that matters. I'm not going to let anything else matter to me.”

Emotions in Shirley ran deep and needed no theatrics. Her hand tightened on Elspeth's and she nodded, but she answered the pledge only with a sensible caution. “It matters that I got AIDS, though.”

Elspeth looked straight into her eyes. “No. It doesn't.”

“The hun it don't!”

“Shirl, we're all going to die soon anyway.”

It was a matter to be accepted like love, like hatred, like Hoadley. Shirley nodded again. Hand in hand, the two women looked down on the town. Then Shirley gasped.

“Son of a bitch! Look at that beast!”

The creature of coal dust and shadows had come around to their side of the pit, come nearer, so that they could hazily see the workings of what appeared to be its feelers, or whiskers, or tentacles.… It was searching, not for food, but casting about as if for a scent. And as they watched, wide-eyed, it threw up the forepart of its shapeless body in what might have been exultation and bellowed forth an uncouth noise like the baying of a hound. Then it lowered its—its sensors, whatever they might be called, and snuffled again, and trundled rapidly up the hill, coming closer.

Elspeth exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, it's tracking us!”

“I don't want to die that soon!” Shirley disentangled her hand from Elspeth's with unromantic haste and grabbed her reins. “Come on!” They kicked their horses into a headlong gallop up the hillside.

They had not yet gone out of sight of the cemetery when Shirley's panicked mind cleared and she understood. The beast was not tracking Elspeth and her. It was trailing Cally. Had to be. And Cally had to be warned. But she said nothing to Elspeth. Shirley was ever the pragmatist; she knew the limitations of human nature. She would not test Elspeth too far.

Instead, she began to watch for the hoofmarks Devil had left, plain on the brickle, even plainer where he had leaped the fallen tree blocking the trolley path. Cally had come this way.

And then Shirley saw the flames rising ahead.

“Elspeth! Hold up!”

Already the trees had thinned, they were in what was not quite a clearing, becoming a young forest, the trolley park of yesteryear, with small tumbledown buildings all around and a larger one going to blazes not far ahead. The horses reared, panicked not only by the sight and smell of the fire, but by the snakes—many snakes fleeing the hilltop inferno, darting out like black rays from a dying sun. And there were people coming out as well, three people, crawling like the snakes from under a shattered wall, then staggering up. Shirley recognized Cally—

Shirley's weakening muscles gave up their struggle to stay on her terrified horse. What did it matter, anyway? What did any of it matter? She let herself be thrown. Elspeth shouted, she heard that through the air rushing around her ears, and the next moment the young woman was crouching beside her. Elspeth had scrambled down from Warrior and let the blood bay mare plunge away.

“Shirl! You okay?”

Shirley lay flat on her back, looking up into tree-tops and Elspeth's anxious face. “Sure. I'm just laying here resting. Why shouldn't I be okay?” Aside from a minor detail called AIDS. But she didn't say that.

Blood rushed to Elspeth's cheeks, and she glowered. “Up!” she snapped. “Get up, you idiot, before a snake bites you!” She hauled at Shirley's arm, not at all gently, and the blond woman heaved herself up, feeling her pale face break into a grin; Elspeth, at least, was back to normal.

Cally coughed and blinked smoke-bleared eyes, trying to see—Barry, had he gotten out all right, had he gotten Joan out? Not that it mattered. But it did matter.

There they were, standing near her, and Joan Musser was coughing as hard as she, the tears streaming down from her protruding eyes, down her deformed, freakish face, that grotesquely familiar face.… And Barry was saying, “Joanie. Joanie,” and putting his arms around her, and kissing her skewed temples, her weeping eyes, and nestling her head against his shoulder. “Joanie, I can't believe it. I'm so glad you're back. Joanie, I love you.” And the Musser girl was holding onto him as if he were the only solid thing left in the world.

And through the flame-tinged haze Cally saw the coming of the horsewomen, saw dark Elspeth, saw Shirley, golden, taking to the air like an angel for an instant before thudding to earth. And the blood-red mare and the gray one running away God knew where, and black Devil raising his head scornfully from his grazing to watch them go, never stirring for the orange-and-black snakes passing between his hooves.

Joan Musser also turned her tear-blurred eyes toward the thud, the hoofbeats, and Shirley stared back as Elspeth pulled her up. “Yo!” she exclaimed. “It's Whatserface. Musser, ain't it?”

Joan hid the face in question against Barry's shoulder, and he rocked her in his arms and whispered and kissed the uneven parting of her hair the color of soiled straw.

Walking unsteadily toward Shirley, Cally began earnestly to talk, as if an explanation was due. “I thought I had the answer,” she soliloquized. “I was so sure. I thought the carousel was the key. We turned it backwards, to turn back time, but it didn't work.” She glanced over her shoulder at the flaming wreckage behind her, then at the preposterous young couple embracing in its light. “Well, it sort of worked.… It didn't do what I expected. Then I thought, what a dummy I am. That carousel around your house, Shirley, it was turning backward the whole time. The horses were facing the wrong way. And the gazebo, when Ahira made it spin, it was going the wrong way. See what I mean? Turning the thing backwards just made monsters.”

Shirley didn't care about any of this. “Cally—”

“If only I could turn it forward again.…” Cally's voice trailed away like a torn cloud, and she had gone very still, and somehow transcendant in her stillness, her wide eyes fixed not on Shirley's face but on something—beyond.

“It was stopped,” Cally whispered. “Like Hoadley. It was all the fun, all the venturing, all the growing up and leaving home and going forward, and they stopped it and locked it up in the dark. If we—”

“For God's sake, shut up!” snapped Elspeth. “Hoadley's wrecked, and so is your carousel. The problem now is—”

“
Cally,
” Shirley interrupted, “Mark's coming.”