The Farm

Chapter Thirty-five

Sarah didn't quite mean to squeeze the trigger. At least, that's what she told herself. But an old woman's reflexes, like all her physical responses, tended to decline with every go-round of the sun. A shotgun was a great weapon if you needed to rake down a thief from close range, but the wide pattern of the bird shot all but guaranteed a few stray pellets.

A few bleeding goats might not be a bad bonus, she rationalized, as the echo of the gun's report slapped off the granite boulders and rolled through the trees. Blue-gray smoke swirled in the Jeep's headlights, and the strong bite of cordite drowned out the moist humus smell of the mountain and the stench of the goats. The frail bones of her shoulder ached from the recoil.

She'd meant to take down those goats nearest to Ray Tester, because they looked ready to chomp down on his legs. But what really flipped her was seeing the goat that had raided her store. She didn't usually carry a grudge, and believed all God's creature's had a rightful place in the world. But this was the same world that held monsters like the Circuit Rider. And it seemed Gordon Smith had gone crazy, too.

She'd never quite trusted the man, and it wasn't just because of his bloodline. Whenever he ate a sandwich and took coffee at the store, he always calculated the tip at exactly 15 percent. He'd do the division longhand on the back of his ticket and round it to the nearest penny. Sarah could only guess what that scrawny, redheaded wife of his had gone through. Now he'd slipped into some sort of Halloween getup and had taken to killing folks.

The gunshot temporarily restored the peace that had prevailed when they had first stumbled onto the gathering. But it was a false peace, inflicted through shock and surprise. In that frozen moment, Sarah had time to absorb tiny details just as the night exploded: Sue Norwood opening the driver's-side door of the Jeep; Odus sitting tall on the bareback horse and looking around like a rustler wondering where to direct the stampede; the man with the hunting bow taking aim at either Gordon or the Circuit Rider; Ray scrambling onto the flat slab of stone and crawling toward the Circuit Rider; Gordon in his scarecrow outfit reaching a gloved hand to the Circuit Rider and pulling that sickly forehead back, exposing the dead preacher's pale and knobby throat; the goats rising to their feet as if heeding some silent command; and David Tester running into the midst of the stirring animals, either chasing his brother or making the same obsessed dash toward the Circuit Rider.

Sarah broke down the barrel and thumbed out the warm, spent shell, reaching in her blouse pocket for a fresh round.

Katy sensed the change in the animals after one of their number had fallen. The night was electric, charged with rage and confusion.

Ray leaped for the Circuit Rider and threw his arms around the preacher, shielding him just as Alex launched another arrow. Katy heard the wet snick of the arrow as it buried itself between Ray's shoulder blades. Ray's wrench bounced off the stone with a dull clink. He gave a soft grunt of surprise, hugging the preacher, looking up into his face as if craving a final benediction. The preacher showed no emotion, just stared back with those beetle-black eyes.

Ray's words were so weak and strained that Katy was sure no one heard them besides herself, Gordon, Jett, and the Circuit Rider.

"I'm the one," Ray said, smiling, dying, slumping against the preacher with the arrow jutting from his back.

"Get him!" Gordon yelled, again pointing his sickle at Alex. At first Katy thought he was addressing the crowd but the goats turned as one and sniffed the air in Alex's direction. The goats gave out cries and squeaks as they moved. Alex backed away, but the goats nearest him had broken into a trot. There was no way he'd make the relative safety of the woods. Even if he did the surefooted goats would have an advantage on the rough terrain.

The horn of a passing goat grazed Katy's wrist, laying open the skin.

"Shit, Mom, you're bleeding," Jett said.

Jett wasn't the only one who noticed. A long-bearded nanny paused bucking against the river of goats and turning toward Katy. It sniffed snorted and kicked up its back legs, clicking its hooves. Then it struggled against the seething tide of animals and headed for Katy as if she had been dipped in honey and oats.

"The rock," Katy said gripping Jett's hand so hard her own fingers ached.

The nanny negotiated the rumbling herd better than Katy did because she was busy dodging bobbing horns and stomping hooves. The nanny was gaining, and Katy was still twenty feet from the rock. And even if she reached the rock, what would Gordon do to her? Cut her with his sickle, or toss her to the meat-eating monsters that somehow obeyed his perverted commands?

The decision was taken from her as a passing goat rammed her in the stomach, knocking the wind from her. Above the high-pitched whining in her ears, she heard Jett scream, and a hundred hoofbeats drummed their death march. Then she was lifted into the air, yanked as if by the ray of a flying saucer or the crook of God's swooping shepherd's staff. She blinked the lime-colored sparks of pain from behind her eyes and found herself flopped belly-down over the back of Odus's horse.

"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 of 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 me unnerving cries of the goats. She focused on the rock, where Gordon stood holding Jett, the eerie scarecrow figure seemingly seven feet tall under me 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 buckteeth. "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 me 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 me edge of me rock and me Circuit Rider kneeled forward, reaching down a hand mat looked the color of rancid soap. She couldn't climb the rock with her injured ankle. She took me 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 me wrong direction, my dear. I'm the one who chooses the sacrifices now. I'm me child of God's favor."

Jett peered out from under her black bangs, eyes wide with fright. Gordon put me 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 sidesaddle 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'11 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 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.