Apocalypse Read Online Free PDF Page B

Therefore he did not see what Cally saw. Afterward, she tried to tell herself that she had imagined what happened, that it was a trick of the light, a shifting shadow, something in her head, though she was not one to imagine things about corpses. She was accustomed to being around them. She brought Mark coffee to the embalming room when he was working late. She slept every night in the upstairs apartment without a thought for the sleepers-never-to-wake down below.
    â€œNo, I have no idea where Joan can be,” Cally said.
    And the dead woman opened her eyes.
    Just a blink, a glimpse, a leer out of the blank implants that covered her sunken eyeballs to give their closed lids the appearance of peaceful repose. The eyelids had been glued shut; how could they move? But move they did, fluttering up to reveal lifeless plastic orbs more horrible than any skeletal stare. Then gone. And Cally stood ashen, wobbling in her riding boots, and Barry Beal was saying, “Mrs. Wilmore? Mrs. Wilmore? You okay? You remember something you heard about Joanie, Mrs. Wilmore?”
    I’m Barry Beal, and I knowed Joanie practically since we was born, and I didn’t like it when she went off that way.
    I didn’t know her that good till we was in junior high together. Thing was, we went to different elementaries. She lived in Hoadley, and I lived about ten miles out. Course I knowed who she was. Everybody in the county knowed who she was from the first time her mom brung her out on the street. You took one look at her face, you didn’t forget. She looked like a squashed frog instead of a little girl. A squashed frog with long yellow hair. Her mom used to comb that hair nice and put ribbons in it like to try and make people look at that, but it didn’t work. The face was what people remembered.
    The kids called her “Frog Face.” Kids was mean in junior high, meaner even than in elementary. These kids, their daddies worked in the steel mills or the coal mines, they all think they got to be big and tough. What I mean, they always called me Retard and Tardo and Jamhead and like that, and done Indian rope burns and noogies on me, but in junior high they stole my money and stuff, locked me in closets, tripped me in the hallway, like that. Them hallways in junior high, with all the kids punching and shoving no matter how much the teachers holler, they’re like hell.
    Even the girls was mean. They hit on me and scratched me when they got a chance. And them boys older than me, think they’re tough, they beat me up one day after school. It took a bunch of them, and they only done that once. I got big brothers, see, took care of them.
    But what I mean is, nobody in junior high wants nothing to do with a tardo or weirdo or a puke face. And there’s a sort of rule people who ain’t what they call normal get stuck together. The kids nobody much talks to talk to each other. I noticed that from little on up. So me and Joanie, we was the two ugliest kids in the school, we seen each other a lot, in lunch and in study hall and just around.
    Joanie wasn’t a retard like me, though. Joanie was real smart.
    I don’t think she showed it in class much. Times I seen her, she was always sitting kind of curled up, like she didn’t want nobody looking at her. And she didn’t hardly say nothing the first few times I set with her at lunch. But after I ate with her two-three times she started talking to me, and then I knowed she was smart.
    â€œThat mark on your face,” she says. “I know what it is.”
    Thing is, I got this big purple splotch on my face. I’d be just average ugly without it, but with it I’m a damn freak. Plus I had zits on top of it back then.
    â€œI’ve been doing some research,” says Joanie. “It’s called a hema—hema something, a port wine stain. You can get it taken off, you know that? They can laser it right off.”
    â€œDon’t want nothing