“Where’s Jett?” she managed to whisper, breath like wet cement in her lungs.
“Can’t reach her,” Odus said. He slapped the horse on the thigh and said, “Come on, Sister Mary, let’s ride out this stampede.”
The horse whinnied and reared, jostling Katy, and for a horrifying split-second she thought she would be hurled from the horse and back among the milling goats. But she grabbed the horse’s neck and held on as they waded through the herd, which was thinning now as the stragglers made their way toward Alex.
Another shotgun blast sounded, and two goats bleated squeals of pain. Katy saw Jett at the edge of the rock, climbing up, finding handholds on the mossy surface, gaining her footing.
Gordon let go of the Circuit Rider, who was still in the grip of Ray’s corpse. He grabbed Jett by the hair and yanked her against his ragged clothing. “I’ll teach you to leave me,” he said.
“We have to save her,” Katy said to Odus.
“These goats are crazy,” Odus said. “Look. They’re eating people.”
He was right. Alex had reached a beech tree and scrambled up into the safety of the branches. Two goats butted the tree trunk, but its girth was several feet in diameter and the tree barely shook. A man screamed as another shot rang out, and Katy looked around to see the deputy, a goat latched onto his leg, another biting the hand that held his pistol. A wounded goat shivered at the officer’s feet, thrown into spasms by a head wound.
The old lady who owned the store had dropped her shotgun and climbed onto the hood of the Jeep, and several goats tried to clamber up the bumper. An old man in a leather jacket, whom Katy didn’t recognize, leveled his shotgun and blasted toward the Jeep, sending pellets scattering across the metal and driving the goats away. The old woman cursed and gripped her knee.
A woman and a younger man with pitchforks stood back-to-back, jabbing at the goats that had them encircled.
“We’re all going crazy,” Katy said.
“We were already at crazy,” Odus said. “We’ve gone way past that now.”
The goats had lost their communal goal and scattered into the night, chasing the people who had been summoned to the surreal revival. Their bleats became guttural cries of hunger. Katy saw one digging its teeth into the neck of one of its brethren that had fallen victim to a gunshot.
Odus guided Sister Mary toward the logging road, urging the horse into a trot. But Katy kicked free, falling to the ground, twisting her ankle as she rolled. She struggled to her feet in the rough, tilled soil where the goats had romped. Goat manure streaked the knees of her pants, and the smell was enough to make her vomit. But she blocked that out, along with the screams of the people and the unnerving cries of the goats. She focused on the rock, where Gordon stood holding Jett, the eerie scarecrow figure seemingly seven feet tall under the moldy straw planter’s hat.
Katy limped toward the rock, passing the preacher’s trampled hat. A goat trotted past her, a dripping chunk of what looked like potted meat clamped between its buck teeth. “Let her go, Gordon,” she said, trying to summon her bitch voice, one she’d packed away in the wake of her divorce.
“Come here and I will,” Gordon said. “It’s you that I wanted, anyway.”
Katy’s gaze shifted from the sackcloth head to the Circuit Rider’s implacable, waxy face. “Is this why you won’t die?” she said to the preacher. “Is this why you kept coming back all those years?”
“It’s not what I want that matters,” he answered through thin, bloodless lips.
Katy reached the edge of the rock and the Circuit Rider kneeled forward, reaching down a hand that looked the color of rancid soap. She couldn’t climb the rock with her injured ankle. She took the preacher’s hand, a chill coursing through her as if a dozen icy needles had penetrated her palm. Despite his gaunt, slack flesh, the Circuit Rider pulled with the strength of a draft animal, and Katy found herself lying alongside Ray Tester’s cooling body.
“You need to kill somebody,” she said to the preacher. “Then do it and get it over with. But that means Jett goes free, right?”
Gordon laughed, a sound that somehow echoed the goats’ ravenous bleats. “You’re praying in the wrong direction, my dear. I’m the one who chooses the sacrifices now. I’m the child of God’s favor.”
Jett peered out from under her black bangs, eyes wide with fright. Gordon put the tip of the sickle against her neck.
“You killed Rebecca,” Katy said, knowing it sounded dumb, as if one murder mattered in a mountain valley where dozens had come to wicked ends.
“She wanted me to kill her,” Gordon said from inside his scarecrow mask. “She gave herself up for the greater good. Because she wanted to belong to me forever. To Solom forever.”
“Then why did she bring us to ... oh.”
The clop of horse hooves sounded on the packed dirt, and Katy thought it was Odus, come to make a rescue attempt. Instead, she saw Rebecca, sitting side-saddle on Old Saint. The vehicle headlights cut through both her and her mount’s bodies as if they were gauze. Rebecca had no head, and Katy thought of Ichabod Crane in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
“Here’s your horse, honey,” Rebecca said, but the words didn’t come from the body. Instead, they came from the head, which floated just beyond the edge of the granite slab. It wore the preacher’s black hat, angled to one side in a parody of fashion. Around her, the goats continued their hunt for human meat.
“I wasn’t ready then.” Gordon said. “I had to grow my power. More sacrifices, more goats killed, more tribute paid to those who bless this land.”
Gordon moved the sickle away from Jett’s throat and waved it at the Circuit Rider. “Just like you did,” he said to the preacher. “Only you killed reluctantly.”
“I just want to rest,” the Circuit Rider said. “Put my three graves together and you can have Solom. And all my other stops.”
Gordon kicked Ray’s limp body. “They’re still willing to die for you. Use it.”
The Circuit Rider shook his head. “My rounds are over.”
“You weren’t fit to carry the Smith name.”
“None of us are worthy.”
Katy eyed the distance between her and Gordon. Even with two good legs, she wouldn’t have been able to reach him before he cut either her or Jett. And a man who could order goats to kill and ghosts to do his dark deeds probably had few limits, anyway. But she had to try. Damned if she would give herself up as Rebecca had.
Not to mention her daughter.
She thought of the promise she’d repeated to Jett so many times that it had become a mindless mantra: We’ll get through it together.
She just hoped it wouldn’t be death’s door that they would go through, side by side, hands held in fear of the waiting unknown.
***
The buck-toothed bastards had him treed like a lost coon.
Alex had dropped his Pearson bow when the herd started chasing him. He’d had one decent shot at Weird Dude, but that other guy had gotten in the way. Alex figured if Weird Dude was some sort of secret government agent, there would be a cover-up and nobody would ever find out about this little gathering on the mountain or the existence of intelligent, mind-controlled killer goats. If only the government wouldn’t have bred or genetically implanted in them a craving for marijuana, Alex would have figured, “Live and let live.” But that was just like them, to use their power to intrude on people’s peace and property.
He looked down at the bleating, sneering creature closest to him, who was reared up on the tree trunk. The strange eyes with their boxy, oblate pupils glittered in the gloomy sweep of headlights.
“Yeah, you’d eat the original U.S. Constitution if it was right there in front of you, wouldn’t you?” he taunted. “The powderheads wrote it on hemp paper, and I know how much you fuckers love hemp.”
The goat twitched its ears in fury, and another goat butted the tree, horns clacking against the bark.
Alex wasn’t in position to work the submach
ine gun, but he undid the snap on his hip holster and drew out the Colt Python. The Circuit Rider and Gordon Smith, who was dressed in a freaky scarecrow costume like an acidhead on Halloween, were still on the rock and were out of pistol range.
Not that Alex had any personal grudge against his neighbor, besides the fact that Gordon’s fence had failed. But the goats seemed to obey Gordon, not Weird Dude. And now Gordon was holding the little Goth girl, the one who had moved in along with the redhead last summer. A man’s private business was a man’s private business, but it didn’t look like your typical Hallmark Special moment.
Alex aimed the pistol in a two-handed grip. The goat stared back along the length of the barrel.
“You are one ugly piece of work.” Alex squeezed the trigger and a brown dot appeared on the animal’s forehead. He knew goats had thick skulls because of their bizarre mating rituals that sometimes caused them to butt heads until one of the males dropped from exhaustion. They weren’t symbols of depraved lust for nothing. But a Python bullet was more than a match for the thick plate of bone, though the entry wound was a little messier than usual. The back of the goat’s head exploded, raining bits of meat and bone on the half-dozen goats surrounding the base of the tree.
The goat’s lips peeled back in a grin.
Leave it to the government to build a goat that wouldn’t die.
***
David had it all wrong.
He figured the Circuit Rider would claim a victim and then drift on into the night, continuing his eternal rounds. It was one of life’s constants, and the people of Solom had adjusted to it over the years. People measured the course of their lives with his visits, along with the September frost and the May buttercups and the first cut of hay in June, the annual flock of tourists in their tinted-window sedans, the final snow in early April that was often the largest of the year. The Circuit Rider was evil, unholy, and murderous, but he was theirs.
So Ray’s death should have ended it. Because Ray had died for the Circuit Rider, accidentally or not. David had made the offering of his own life, which would have spared the others who were now being attacked by crazed goats. But his own soul had been found wanting, his faith weak, his meat unworthy of the great banquet prepared by Harmon Smith.
Except…
David had climbed back into Ray’s truck when the goats went wild, and three of them battered at the driver’s side door, taking turns launching their horns against the sheet metal. Ray’s truck bed had no tailgate, and a shaggy-faced billy had climbed into the bed among the rusty chains, boards, and hand tools. One blow of those curving horns would shatter the rear windshield.
But that was okay.
David understood now.
It wasn’t the Circuit Rider who was calling the shots. Gordon Smith had somehow usurped his ancestor. Gordon, a student of myth and ritual, had claimed whatever tilted pulpit granted the power of life and death in Solom.
But all actions had been set in motion long ago by that larger, unseen Hand that slept behind the stars.
The One who wielded that same Divine Hand, the One who hadn’t found David a worthy sacrifice, triggered a blinding rage. He’d lost his brother, Gordon Smith had been granted some bizarre supernatural power, and goats were ravaging his neighbors and the members of his congregation. Sure, there were a satisfactory number of Free Willers and Southern Baptists among the victims, but God was filling up the good spaces in heaven with those who had spent life on their knees, not those who had accepted His grace without doubt or the craving for mortal intervention.
Hooves rattled in the metal bed of the truck, and the rear windshield exploded behind him. Glass showered down the back of David’s neck. The goat’s horns caught in the gun rack, and David leaned toward the passenger side out of reach of the animal’s frantic jaws. The goat’s breath stank of bad blood and sulfur.
The sheriff’s deputy had fallen and two goats were tugging him in different directions, like dogs fighting over a string of chitlins. The deputy’s pistol lay just outside the glare of headlights, but each blue sweep of the patrol car’s bubble lights reflected the sheen of the barrel. David wasn’t sure God required his creatures to make such decisions, but the pistol was within his reach for a reason.
He flung open the truck door and dove for the gun. One of the goats dropped the deputy’s arm, which flopped against the leaf-covered ground and lay still. The goat tossed his head and charged, pointing its whorl of bony horns at David. David reached the gun, not knowing whether the safety was on or off, then remembered that the deputy had squeezed off at least one shot. He brought it to chest level and fired wildly, punching three holes in the goat’s back and neck. It didn’t slow at all, closing the ten feet between them before David could draw a breath, then the stony head knocked him in the chest and he lay stunned in the damp leaves of the forest clearing. Above the strobing blue lights were the scatter of stars and the bloated eye of the moon.
And, above it all, the eye of God, looking down.
He was dimly aware of hooves drumming, of large shapes hovering around him. He was just regaining his breath when teeth latched onto his throat.
We are loaves and fishes feeding the multitude, he thought, the pain blending with the bruised ache in his chest. As other mouths set to work in the serious business of feeding, a final thought brought a crippled smile to his face:
I have been found worthy after all.
***
Gordo is nutso, plain and simple.
But worse than the nutso is, like, the power to make goats kill people.
Besides the fact that he wants to kill me and Mom.
Jett could smell Gordon’s pompous aftershave beneath the musty, dusty scarecrow outfit, and that sickened her almost as much as her anger and fear. Her throat hurt where he’d stuck the point of his sickle against, and a warm trickle descended the slope of her neck. The persistent wah of the police lights made her dizzy as screams and frantic bleats blended into a muddy music. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine she was at one of the industrial raves from her druggie days in Charlotte, with her heart providing the driving bass beat.
But this rave was the kind that killed.
She met her mom’s eyes and could read the look. That sappy old “We’ll get through this together,” but for the first time, Jett welcomed it and needed it.
She didn’t think it would work on a ghost, but it might on a guy who had more balls than sense. She stepped to the side while Gordon was focused on the Circuit Rider, then launched one of her feet, clad in a heavy black lace-up boot that Gordon had so often ridiculed, and planted it firmly in his crotch. The air left him like a pinpricked balloon and he folded up.
She couldn’t be sure, but the Circuit Rider’s grim lips might have lifted in a smile.
“Run!” Katy yelled, and Jett jumped from the stone. The goats had scattered enough so that she had a clear path to the Subaru, or to the woods if she thought the trees offered more protection. But she didn’t want to leave Mom. That “together” thing bit both ways.
“Come on, Mom,” she said.
Gordon recovered and reached for Katy, catching her by her long red hair. He yanked and she was jerked backward. “Come here, bitch. My things never leave me, even when they’re dead.”
He raised the sickle and its blade caught the blue light and reflected a curve of icy fire.
That’s when the Circuit Rider erupted.
He rose in a vengeful flurry of black-clad limbs, his pale head nearly effervescent in the headlights, eyes two cold pools of diseased ichor.
“You want to ride in my saddle,” Harmon Smith said. “But are you worthy?”
Startled, Gordon turned to face his deceased ancestor, still gripping Katy’s hair with one gloved hand. But “face” wasn’t the right word, Jett thought, because Gordon’s was hidden by the coarse cloth and the Circuit Rider’s waxen, lumpy features could hardly be described by that word.
“I’ve proven myself worthy,” Gordon
said. “Know me by my fruits.”
“You don’t know Solom,” the Circuit Rider said. “And your tree is diseased.”
Jett heard thundering hooves and thought some big billy goat—Methuselah, Seth, Jacob, or whatever Old Testament fucker Gordon had picked for a name—was charging. She looked away from the stone stage to see Rebecca and Old Saint galloping toward her. Rebecca wore her head again, but her skin had gone grave-gray and mottled, the ragged flesh of her neck flapping in the breeze, her long dark hair billowing behind her like the threads of a ragged burial shroud.
Before the ghostly horse and rider could reach her, Odus rumbled in on his paint pony, hunched over the pony’s neck, whispering in her ear, then raising his voice to a shout. “I knew you’d send the right tool,” he shouted at the sky, and Jett figured he was just one more squirrel-shit-nutty Solom inmate, except he rode like a holy warrior on a suicide mission.
As she watched, Old Saint grew more solid, his hooves hammering thirty feet away, clumps of dirt flying in his wake. Rebecca, too, grew more solid, though still bloodless, her lips black, skin withered, face shrunken by decay.
“These are my people,” the Circuit Rider said, and Odus narrowed the gap, the two horses charging as if their riders were competing in a lanceless joust.
“I’ll never need drugs again,” Jett whispered to herself just before the horses collided.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Sue waved her climber’s pick-ax in front of her as if it were a charm, but the three goats circling her seemed wholly unimpressed. She’d had the idea—absurd in hindsight, though she’d wasted little time in retrospection—that she could scare the goats away long enough to get Sarah down from the hood of the Jeep. But Sarah was sharp enough to save herself. A woman didn’t live to get that old without a strong sense of self-preservation.
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