Apocalypse Read Free

lazily spread. Despite herself, Cally shifted her gaze down his broad shoulders and chest to his genitals, so casually displayed. They bulked large even at rest. She had never seen the penis of an uncircumcised man before, and her lips moved; at once she wanted to swallow it into her mouth, tasting it, the new thing, the exotic fruit.… Her reaction moved hot and tight through her groin, ruining the depth and relaxation of her riding seat, and for a moment she thought, hit-and-run, of Mark. She loved him. She loved him. But it had been so long since he had moved her the same way, and another word for pagan was infidel.… She hoped she did not blush, but on the weird stranger’s sculpted-sugar face she thought she saw the flicker of a smile.
    He wet his lips with a slow, probing tongue, then spoke. “Prepare,” he said.
    Cally’s hand left Dove’s reins and faltered to the buttons of her cotton shirt between her flat breasts. “What?” she whispered. “What do you mean?”
    â€œPrepare,” he said again, the single word.
    Though he had not moved, even his hand had not paused in its stroking of the red fox, though the snake had not uncoiled from its place at his side, though no part of him had roused, as Cally could plainly see, she could envision only one immediate event for which she might prepare, and think only one thought, half-frightened, half-thrilled: He Is Not Nice.
    â€œGo away,” she said to him, since even on horseback she herself did not seem able to do so. “Let me alone.”
    He grinned wickedly at her, then wavered like heat haze in the air, thinned and disappeared. On the ground where he had been lay a massive stub of log, three feet thick and oddly hacked and gouged as if someone had gone mad with a chain saw.
    The deer, the fox, the hawk and snake remained, momentarily. Then the deer leaped away, the hawk wheeled into sky, the others darted into underbrush. The snake sluggishly coiled, regarding woman and horse with an impersonal stare. Dove seemed to see it for the first time, shied and snorted at it.
    Cally turned the mare, kicked hard and sent her galloping back toward the stable. But Dove had reverted to her deadhead self and would not gallop long on the steep trails. Cally let her slow to her customary walk. What, in fact, was there to run from? She could not be hearing what she thought she was hearing in the cicada chorus; she could not have seen what she thought she had seen. She had to be going insane.
    The thought did not trouble her. Insanity seemed reasonable under her personal circumstances.
    The trail led past the coal mine, not running on that day, or she would not have been able to ride a horse past it, even so tame a horse as Dove. It made an appalling noise; it would have vibrated the woods like a gigantic purring cat. A huge beast hidden in blackness, buried and shaking the world.
    She turned Dove onto the black-gravel mine road, bound for the rough-timber mine tipple that reared above the scrub woods.
    The mine hermit was out as she came clopping through, Dove’s hooves striking crisp beats from the brickle. “Hi, Mr. Zankowski,” Cally called, because as a tenet of etiquette she was pleasant to everyone always, no matter what her own state of mind. But she spoke too early, because Mr. Zankowski made her nervous.
    She had seen him a few times before, and he had always answered her greeting with a shy smile and a tentative lift of the hand, nothing more. A small, scrawny man dressed in work clothes too big for him, he ran the mine alone, defying dozens of government regulations, and lived alone in the shack at the tipple. On its plywood walls and low, rusting roof he had spray-painted messages: “Repent!” and “Kilroy was here,” “Eternity Awaits!” and “Do Not Harm Snake.”
    â€œHi, Mr. Zankowski,” Cally said again when she got nearer.
    He was standing on the mine road,