Apocalypse by Nancy Springer

of the walk, the primal rhythm of the trot, the rocking canter, so that they were no longer Shirley, Cally, Gigi and Elspeth, but something more, something ancient and powerful and uncaring.
    It was good, even better than most days, to be on the move. There was more than usual to be left behind. The talk in the stable as they readied the horses had been constrained, not as pleasant as usual. Something unspoken had lurked like a rat in the shadows of the aisleway.
    Elspeth, usually the silent one, blurted, “Where shall we go?”
    Elspeth looked to Shirley, but it was Cally who spoke. Already, after the first jog down the pasture line, her taut face, haggard with constant dieting, had smoothed and softened. “Back behind the mine,” she said. On horseback, with her fellow riders, she was ready to face the same things that sent her fleeing in her nightmares, in the nuptial bed at home. She wanted to return to the place where she had seen—him. The naked one whose face she could not recall nearly as plainly as she did his crotch.
    Cally led off. She took them the roundabout way, which no one minded; the longer the ride the better. Ridge trail to what they called the Periwinkle Path to the old Seldom road, then up the Grapevine Trail … Even though the grapevines looped low, Elspeth did not offer to use the sword. No one mentioned it.
    â€œWhere are the cicadas today?” Cally asked suddenly.
    Elspeth stiffened, because in her sketchbook was a drawing she had not made; something had taken control of her hand. But she covered up her discomfiture with scorn. “Gone away. Where were you expecting them to be?”
    â€œI’m expecting something else,” said Cally. Being on horseback made her brave, comparatively. The comradeship of the ride, the bond of women on horseback, made her able to tell the others about the eerie encounter she had mentioned to no one else. They let their horses browse and listened: Shirley intent, Gigi dourly smiling, Elspeth hiding as always behind her sulky, beautiful face.
    â€œHe was buck naked?” asked Gigi, salacious rather than shocked.
    â€œThere were animals all around him, and it was like he was another animal. But he looked at me like he was thinking.”
    Even Gigi did not snicker. The feel of the day was too shadowy for that. Cicada silence hung heavy as the saffron haze over Hoadley.
    â€œAll he said was ‘Prepare’?” Shirley had been a bus driver, a plumber, a forklift operator, a short order cook. As a longtime manager of practical affairs, she wanted to make sure she had the message straight.
    â€œPrepare. That’s all he said. Then he disappeared.”
    â€œI want to see him,” said Gigi, who plunged her horse down cliffsides and into rivers, the boldest rider in the stable, always, even though she was by far the oldest. Perhaps because she was the oldest. She had the least to lose.
    â€œI don’t,” said Elspeth, honest for a change. She felt chilled as if by the shivery stare of eyes weirdly bright as a wolf’s.
    â€œNow, it ain’t likely to be up to us, whether or not we see him,” Shirley put in, quelling argument before it could start. Even more than most women she spoke mildly and strove to keep peace. This was the role of a Hoadley woman in her family, to smooth things over, and to Shirley the world was family. “We can at least go to see where he was,” she added like a good mother to disappointed children.
    The women bullied their horses away from their browsing and sent them forward again. And for a while, riding the narrow, vine-choked trail, they kept an unnatural silence.
    â€œDo you suppose it could be the, you know?” asked Gigi when finally they came out onto the logging road. “The Second Coming we’re supposed to prepare for?”
    â€œThe millennium? The Last Judgment?” Elspeth spoke with trembling scorn and a voice that rose in pitch with