Apocalypse (36 page)

And then hell happened.

Mrs. Wilmore screamed. And Joanie busted away from me and run straight toward the fight. And I'm so shook by what I see going on that it's a second before I run after her.

What's happening is, the beast is changing, right then and there. Getting smaller, weaker. Snakes, claw, horns, all going away. Fur, smoothing out into skin. The beast was turning into a man. Just regular man not even as tall as me, and that other monster still holding him in its claws.

“Mark!” came a scream.

See, I didn't know till I seed what was happening that the beast was Mr. Wilmore, or the God-awful danger he had put himself in, attacking the thing that was threatening his wife. But Joanie must've knowed all along. What the devil knowed, she knowed, she said. And I guess she just didn't want no more bad things to happen. So she run like hell to help.

“Mark!” his wife is crying and screaming, trying to get up and go to him. But she couldn't. Seemed like she didn't have no strength left since she got knocked down that last time. And even if she could get up, what could she do, skinny little starved thing like she was?

And I was running too, more on account of Joanie than Mr. Wilmore—I liked him a lot, he was a good boss to me, but I ain't sure I would've fought no monster just for him—anyways, Joanie was flying along in front of me in that red dress of hers like wings and I was running fast as I could but I seemed to go slow, so slow, I would never catch her or get there in time, and that poison stinger tail was coming up, I could see it, Mr. Wilmore had his foot on top of it but that wasn't no use, nobody could be that strong to keep that thing down with their foot. It was all hard shell and muscle and it was as big as him. And the locust had him around the neck with its black bone hands, and I seen a horrible grin on its old gray face, and its tail come up in a curve like a wrestler's arm, in half a second it would have him—

And Joanie thrown herself right on top of it.

She took that hard sharp stinger and pressed the poison spine of it in between her breasts and hugged it there like it was—like it was her lover. And she rode the rest of it like she was riding a horse. And I knowed she'd killed herself as much as saved anybody else, and it drove me crazy that she'd do herself that way. I didn't even try to stop running. I piled into that helldamn black murdering stingertail death king and tried to take it apart with my bare hands. I remember snapping off its wing like the cruddy thing come out of a cereal box. I remember ramming my fist into its creepy old face, into one of its hateful eyes. I remember breaking one of its black arms and kicking it in the gut. Other than that I don't remember much until I was wore out and done being crazy. Then I stood there panting and I seen them other women standing beside me. They was holding tree branches they been using like clubs, they been helping me. And that goddamn killer locust was laying there good and dead.

I thanked them women later. I guess maybe them helping me was what kept me from getting myself killed. But there wasn't nothing nobody could do to help Joanie.

She was laying sloppy with blood and pieces of bug shell and stuff, like she couldn't move, but she wasn't dead yet, because I seen her eyes on me, and I went to her quick. “Joanie,” I says, “God damn, why'd you have to go and do that?” Right away I knowed it wasn't the right thing to say. There wasn't no time for yelling at her. “Does it hurt bad?” I says. “Joanie, say it don't hurt.”

Her eyes told me no. Seemed like she couldn't hardly talk or even move her mouth. Since I knowed it wouldn't hurt her, I got down beside her, I wanted to hold her. But her eyes looked a warning at me, and then I understood why. The stinger was still laying beside her. She was scared it would poison me.

“I won't touch it,” I says, and then she lets me take her into my arms. I cuddled her head in my lap and kissed her face. “You're beautiful,” I says. I guess maybe she wouldn't have looked beautiful to nobody else, especially all messed up with blood like she was, but she did to me. Except I meant beautiful in a different way, too. I wished she wouldn't of died, but if she had to, it was beautiful the way she done it. Saving somebody else. A real normal, too. Wasn't nobody more normal than Mr. Wilmore, him being a funeral director and all. I guessed Joanie'd stopped hating normals.

A little ways away is Mrs. Wilmore holding Mr. Wilmore the same way I was holding Joanie. She has his head in her lap. I think maybe he's dying too, and he better not. It wouldn't of been no use Joanie should die if he would die too.

Joanie is still breathing, slow, real slow, she's having trouble, like her chest don't want to work. The poison, see, it's shutting her down one thing at a time, first her arms and legs, then her chest, and next her heart—and after that it would be up to me to shut her eyes for her. She must've knowed, too, what was happening, because her eyes blinked fast and her mouth moved. I could tell it was all she could do to make her mouth move. I could tell she really wanted to say something, and I put my ear down close to her lips. Her voice was just a breath. I could just barely hear her. I still ain't sure she really said what I thought she did.

“Bar—I—love—you.…”

Maybe I was just hearing what I wanted to hear. And anyways I didn't believe her none, not for a minute. I knowed if I'd heard her right, she was just saying it. The way things was for her, maybe she'd done what was best, getting herself killed. I knowed she had too much pain to love nobody. And I was crying anyways, didn't even know when I'd started but there was tears dripping down on her from my face, pink tears, because that damn bug bashed me some and I got blood on me. And I was looking at Joanie, and she was looking at me, her eyes was still looking at me even though she stopped breathing, and then all of a sudden even though they was still open her eyes wasn't seeing me no more. But I held her a while longer before I laid her down and straightened her out and closed them for her.

Then I made myself stop crying. What she said there at the end, she meant that to stop me crying. She at least cared about me some, as much as she could care about anybody. I could tell them things. I could most always tell what she was feeling from her voice.

God, I'd never hear it again, ever.

But look on the bright side. The way things was going, maybe there wouldn't be too much ever for me to get through.

“There's something I've got to say,” Mark Wilmore told his wife. “How right you were about all this.”

Holding his head on her lap, Cally stroked his cheek (her hand, so soda-straw tenuous as to seem nearly insubstantial) without replying. She gazed off over the treetops at a yellow sky turning black with Hoadley smoke. All this: death and pestilence, famine and war, fire and tumult and a black pit, Hoadley's destruction and world's end.… Her thinking had changed so much it took her a moment to comprehend that Mark remembered how the long quarrel had started and wanted to set it straight. Wanted to mend it before the end.

“I'm not so sure,” she said finally. “Seems to me that I almost made it happen. The crying babies I heard, they were me, but then next thing there were hungerbabies in the trees. I made up my mind that men were monsters, and … Mark, about the girl who was raped—did you really—you know.…”

He did not know. He looked up at her blankly.

“You don't remember?”

“The blond one, worked at the drugstore? I don't remember a thing about her. What did I do?”

“Nothing.”

“Cal, I've got to know what I did.”

“No, you don't. Trust me.” It was a better outcome than she could ever have hoped for, that this gentle man her husband was not ridden by such bedeviling memories. She smiled like sunrise as she gazed down at him. “And you don't remember—” She hesitated, afraid to say “beast,” and found a euphemism. “You don't remember going down under the town?”

He shook his head. He did not recall coming up out of the pit either; he remembered little of being Mark the Beast. “I just remember—coming back. Knowing that I loved you.”

His love for her had brought him back to human form, or hers for him—it didn't matter which. She put her cheek next to his and hugged him. She had twisted her knee, but he was not injured. He lay in her lap merely because he felt a bittersweet lethargy, as did she. These last few hours of their lives, of their world, they would spend together.

“You were right to send the kids away,” said Mark after she had sat up and found his hand with hers. A tremor in his voice told more than the words did; he was wishing he could be with the children one last time. But he believed they would live after he was gone. Cally's hand tightened on his, but she said nothing. No use making him suffer what she was thinking: that Tammy and Owen might as well have stayed in Hoadley for all the good she had done. World's end would come to find them soon after it had found Mark and her. There was no way she could save them for long.

The carousel burned low. A small distance away, Barry Beal hulked bearlike and motionless over Joan Musser's body. No one tried to speak to him. Downslope, someone moved between the trees: Shirley and Elspeth returning, coming up the trolley path, arms around each other. They had gone to have a look at Hoadley, and perhaps to be alone together.

“The pit keeps spreading,” Shirley reported to Cally, keeping her loud voice low, as if it mattered who heard. Not wishing to disturb Barry, perhaps. “The town is all but gone. And there's a beast down there, scouting around.”

Mark blinked and sat up with a faint scowl, as if his franchise had been invaded. “A new beast?”

“It makes sense,” Cally said. Hoadley had been a town where women were bitter and men wore their egos on their sleeves; why would there be any lack of beasts? The new beast would carry on to the other side of the mountains what had begun in Hoadley, the hub. Perhaps the beast was Gigi. Perhaps the children, Owen and Tammy, would die as other children had died, by her hands.

The sky was darkening, the shadows growing even darker than the smoke had made them. Others might have thought that it was the dusk of a long, long day. But Cally knew it was not just another twilight. It was the falling of a final night.

Only the carousel gave light, and its fire had dwindled to embers. Cally looked to see how soon it would be dark.…

She grabbed at Mark's shoulder. “The horses!”

He gazed at her, seeing how her lips had slightly parted, seeing how vulnerable and potent she was. “That black horse of yours is gone,” he said. “You could have ridden away from me on it. I remember that much.”

She was staring beyond him. “Not those horses!” Cally felt an impatient lack of regret that the four snorting horses of Death and War and Famine and Pestilence were gone. “Look!” She pointed. “Mark, there!”

He swiveled and saw: shining in the dusk, the white horse of the hero, with mane and tail of gold. And others: palominos, and pintos with yellow saddles, and pearly dapple grays with hooves of silver. His jaw dropped. Nothing was distinct except the horses standing there, and they seemed to glow; at first he did not understand.

“The carousel!” Cally gasped. “Mark, it's not destroyed!”

The building that had sheltered—or shadowed—and hidden it was gone, burned away to black coals. Even the round framework of the carousel was gone; clouds of smoke wheeled over it instead of a cornice and girders. But the horses stood forth in the twilight lucent, uncharred, changed and freed. Airily poised, amid dark of smoke and nightfall and doom they shone like dawn's dew, like newborn winged things rising from the ashes.

“Mark!” Cally breathed. “If we can make it go …”

Somewhere behind the smoke, the cloud, stars still lit the sky.

Gawking, struggling with the sense of what he was seeing, Mark complained, “Cal …”

“
Forward
, don't you see? It has to go forward.”

He swung around to protest, but the sight of her stopped him. In the thin carousel light, purifying as moonlight, her fleshless face was ethereal, spiritous, not that of a skeleton any longer but that of an angel.

Using his shoulder to take the weight off her injured leg, she got up from the ground. Through her hand he felt her trembling excitement, her urgency, and he hurried to stand beside her, holding her arm to prevent her falling; already she was limping forward. “Shirley! Elspeth!” she called.

They were huddled not far away, arms around each other, oblivious to anything but each other until Cally's cry recalled them. There was clarion in Cally's voice. “Come on! We've got to get Hoadley moving again.”

“Hoadley?” Shirley blinked at her. “Hoadley's gone.”

“Not yet. Listen.”

“Listen to what?”

“In the air! Listen.”

The plaint, the timeworn familiar sighs ever trundling in the same rutted circle.… In the benighted trees all around them they heard the cicadas with the faces of aborted babies, of dead souls, of bad memories. “Crossed knives mean a quarrel,” wept one.

“Go out the same door you came in,” quavered another, “or someone will die.”

“Whistling girls and crowing hens—”

“Always come to bad ends!”

“Looking at the sky will drive you crazy … crazy … crazy …”

“Doom,” they wailed, “doom.”

“That's Hoadley, all right,” said Shirley with rueful tenderness in her voice.

Already Cally led the way again toward the carousel. “Come on!”

“Lord,” said Elspeth, some of her old scorn back. “If that's Hoadley, why do you
want
to save it?”

“Because if it goes, the rest of the world goes soon after.”

None of them disbelieved her. In the dark the cicadas crooned.

The white wooden lead horse, the hero horse of the carousel, no longer carried an ominous brass disc or a bridle to wear it on, but instead wore his wild golden mane like a crown. On his back was no saddle, but instead a kingly mantle of white and gold cloaked his shoulders and sides, fastened by a silver breastplate beneath his neck. It was to him that Cally limped. But when she pulled her arm away from Mark and put her hand on a white hock to urge the carousel into motion, she snatched it away again.