Apocalypse by Nancy Springer

ones. Out of the ground.” Elspeth stared over their heads with the glaze of intuition in her eyes. “Aren’t the dead supposed to come up out of the ground?”
    This came close to speaking something none of them wanted to say. Shirley gawked, and even Gigi seemed shaken. But Cally, oddly, turned suddenly serene. Death procedures were familiar footing to her.
    â€œNot that way, they’re not supposed to come up,” she said.
    â€œWell, that’s the way I’d do it,” said Elspeth with knife-edge of envy in her voice. And with a shadowed awe, the admiration of an artist for another—for a mystery artist, work exhibited but identity unknown. “If I were taking Hoadley down, I’d do it with a chorus, a swarming of the dead. That’s just the way I’d do it.”
    Shirley said, “So who’s doing it? A witch, or—or God, or what?”
    â€œHow the hell should I know?” Elspeth reverted to her customary peevishness. “And what the hell can it possibly matter?”
    â€œIt matters.” Shirley tried, ineffectually, to explain herself. “It’s not like we’re just talking here. It’s happening. ”
    â€œWe don’t really know what’s happening,” said Cally.
    â€œDon’t we?” said Gigi.
    The four horsewomen rode back to the stable in silence. Elspeth’s sword chafed against her leg; she had not touched it since leaving the barn, and no one seemed to find it odd that she had not used it on anything, not even on blackberries.
    There were plenty of dead babies in the ground around and under Hoadley. Aboriginal babies, among others. The town had been founded on blood-soaked ground. The first settlers, stalwart Pennsylvania Germans, had massacred or driven away all the savages they had found in the area, in retribution for an Indian raid (distant, probably by another tribe) on another frontier settlement. With the natives duly dispatched, they had set themselves to making the place a new Eden.
    It was an Eden slow in coming, as the stony hills did not take well to farming. The growing season was short, the winters long, the labor hard. More babies died, babies white as wheat flour, joining the red ones under the ground: pale babies dead of pneumonia and “teething” and scarlet fever and “paralysis” and a hundred other diseases, and sometimes of starvation, neglect or abuse. Whole families died or moved to more fertile ground.
    But wherever any folk at all remained, food had to be grown. By the nineteenth century, Eden had at last been established. Hoadley was a country village, an isolated hamlet, picturesquely located amid the Canadawa Range of the Appalachians on the banks of swift-flowing, crystalline Trout Creek; just below the village, the river plunged over fern-draped falls into a gorge that ran for a mile and a half, every inch of it lovely with moss and cliffside and huge old trees and leaf-sifted light on the sweet water. The place was known as far away as Pittsburgh as a beauty spot. An artist’s colony of sorts became established there, and in the summer society people came to improve their minds in the peaceful contemplation of art, nature and each other. There were a few rooming houses, a general store, and one good hotel for the summer visitors, where downstairs the artists drank ale.
    Then someone discovered coal.
    Within the year the village had turned to a wildly thriving boom town, with new buildings thrown up daily as the mines bored down and the money flowed the way the stream once had. All the trees for miles were gone, cut down to make tipples and railroad ties and mine timbers, and the smoke of burning debris filled the air. Trout Creek ran choked with mud, its course diverted under new roads, around new buildings. Concrete supports stood atop the waterfall, carrying the black railroad bridge overhead. On every available inch of the valley the mine-town row houses