***
The buck-toothed bastards had him treed like a lost coon.
Alex had dropped his Pearson bow when the flock 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 powder-heads 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 submachine 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 was 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, and then the stony head knocked him in the chest and he lay stunned in me 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 it, 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 luminescent 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 waxy lumpen 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 pickax 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.
Sue didn't pay much attention to the doings in the center of the clearing. She was too intent on getting Sarah to safety and then making a beeline down the mountain. But as Odus Hampton and the creepy woman sped hell-bent toward one another, Sue couldn't help but look. So did the goats, and Sue noted that the woman was dead, sickly pale, rotted, the skin drawn tight around her skull. Sue clambered onto the hood, the pickax in her fist. Hearing the thrump of metal, the goats turned again and leaped up onto the Jeep, trying to get a foothold on the dew-slick front bumper.
"About time you came to the rescue," Sarah said. "I thought I'd hooked up with the wrong spunky sidekick for a second there."
"I haven't rescued either of us yet," she said, digging the point of the pickax into the Jeep's soft-top. The vinyl-coated fabric ripped and she pulled back on the climbing tool, working the gap wider. A new top would cost her five hundred dollars, but she was sure she'd find a way to write the expense off on her taxes. Surely there was a category for supernatural casualty.
A goat gained enough traction to leap forward and nip her shoe. Sarah stomped on the animal's head bouncing it like a coconut and with about as much effect. Sue peeled the top back. "Get in," she said and as she helped Sarah work her knobby limbs over the windshield and into the Jeep, a siren scream of twin whinnies slit the night.
Odus figured the tool would be given, the sword put in his hand at the moment of truth. High philosophy had never been his strong point. He was more comfortable with the kind of mental ramblings brought on by the bottom of a whiskey pint, and his truths were those of nature: trout bit better just before a storm, wild turkeys were smart enough to walk around in a hunter's tracks, marigolds and onions kept bugs out of the garden.
Now he faced a truth that was nature, grown wild with the night, legs flailing, tail twitching, neck hunched low as she charged. Odus wasn't sure if he'd guided Sister Mary or if the horse had propelled itself through some inner command. Either way, the paint pony had enough giddyup to break both their necks. As the distance narrowed he got a good look at the thing riding Old Saint. He'd worked for the Smiths before Rebecca had been killed and had always thought her the sweetest of ladies. Plus she cooked up a mean parsnip pie.
But now she looked to be serving up a different kind of meanness, one brought by the anger of the grave.
Odus wasn't sure what was going to happen, but the showdown felt right. Maybe he wasn't supposed to take down Harmon Smith after all. Maybe Odus was just supposed to knock the preacher's legs out from under him in the form of his horse.
But Old Saint looked massive and solid not two hundred years dead. Twice the weight of Sister Mary, the horse was liable to knock them into next week, skipping Sunday on the way.
Odus was close enough to see the steamy breath pluming from Old Saint's nostrils and to look into the cruel caves in Rebecca's skull where her eyes had once perched.
Fourteen hundred pounds of horseflesh met and the forest shuddered.
Alex had used up the rounds in the Colt Python, but the goats still circled below him. A couple had fallen, those whose limbs had been clipped by bullets, but none of them had died, despite shots that landed between the eyes or dead-on in the heart. Sure, the wounds slowed them down a little, but they also made them angrier, like a hive of bees that had been smoked. The marijuana they'd munched must have made them ornery instead of mellowing them out.
Alex adjusted his position in the branches and fumbled the AKR submachine gun into his lap. He kicked back the lever and surveyed the clearing. Weird Dude Walking and the scarecrow creep were going at it like a Republican and a Democrat fighting over a defense contract. The little neighbor girl, the Goth with the dyed-black bangs, stood alone in the clearing as the two horses smacked into each other.
The thunder of slapping meat was like an artillery blast in the September night.
The horses collided, and for one long second, they merged. The spotted horse and the giant black horse were a tangle of knotted knees, forelegs, hooves, and stringy hair. They appeared to be one quivering mass of flesh, and the fellow who worked on the Smith farm was thrown clear, rolling toward the Goth girl. Rebecca, or the rickety rack of skin and dry bone that wore her features, became part of the orgiastic wad of insane magic.
To Alex, it wasn't supernatural magic or illusion, just another test run for the government. No doubt he'd have to be deprogrammed (if they took him alive, that was, and he hadn't made that decision yet) after it was all over. But for now, he had a pouch full of ammunition and enough goats on hand to just about repay the property loss he'd suffered.
He locked down on the trigger and the Russian-made submachine gun kicked out its sweet staccato song.
Katy tugged away from Gordon, but his fingers were hooked into her hair. She screamed at Jett when the horses slammed into each other, but Jett had already jumped back.
"I take back what is mine," the Circuit Rider said.
"It's not yours anymore," Gordon said, sweeping the sickle down toward Katy. She felt me tension of his muscles more than she saw me descending blow, and she twisted away, the back of her skull on fire where the roots of her hair gave way. She cringed,
anticipating the cold slice of steel, but me Circuit Rider reached out and caught Gordon's wrist like a frog's tongue snatching a mosquito out of the air.
"I take back what is mine," the Circuit Rider said.
Gordon released Katy as he and his unnatural ancestor struggled. A metallic hail rained down on the night, and Katy recognized it as automatic gunfire. Slugs whined through the night air, thwacking into trees, pinging off rocks, and ripping into vehicles.
"Get down, Jett," Katy yelled.
The Circuit Rider forced the sickle to Gordon's face, dragging the tip down so that it cut into the scarecrow mask, dissecting the black stitched lips. Blood appeared around me tear, darkening the coarse sackcloth.
"Show your face," the Circuit Rider said.
Gordon used his superior height and weight to bend me Circuit Rider back, grunting with effort. Katy realized she was pulling for the dead preacher. Despite his reputation, he seemed the lesser of two evils at the moment.
She knelt over Ray Tester and yanked the arrow out of his back, and me tip emerged with a wet sloosh. She gripped the blood-slick arrow in both hands and spun, ramming it up into Gordon's gut. He jerked in a spasm of pain, and in that motion, the sickle swept into the Circuit Rider's neck. The pale, waxy flesh tore like paper, and a black powdery substance spilled out. Except it wasn't powder: the tiny specks were alive and crawling.
Katy jumped down as Gordon lurched across the stone, conducting a crazy scarecrow waltz that might have mimicked those sacrificial harvest celebrations of long ago. He tottered and fell, planting the arrow more deeply inside him.
The Circuit Rider stood, his hands spread wide, the black scrabbling creatures leaking from his wound.
He smiled at Katy, as grim and dark an expression, but also as peaceful, as shed ever seen. "You are the light of the world" he said.
Then he was gone.
"Get this jalopy in gear," Sarah said, as Sue started the Jeep.
The Farm Page 39
